


The First Ten Lives of Steven Gerrard

by hou_dini



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Science Fiction, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-26 10:09:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5000716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hou_dini/pseuds/hou_dini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, every time Steven Gerrard dies, he always returns to where he began, a child in London with all the knowledge of a life lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes - including the fact that, no matter how hard he tries, he can never save Xabi Alonso's life for too long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little different from my usual contemporary-everyday-life sort of story. I got the idea after reading an amazing book called _The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August_ , by Claire North. So if you have read this book, you’ll find many similarities. However, I did have to change lots of things in order for it to fit my purpose. If you have not read the book, I highly recommend that you do! 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy this. It’ll be a short two chapters story which I only split because I thought it was getting too long for one single chapter. No one likes to read a 30k words story at once, right? It should be pretty quick, this one. It’s a little confusing at first but I promise it makes sense later.
> 
> As always, I have to remind you that English is not my first language and this story had not been beta’ed, so please be kind! I’m very sorry for all the mistakes. And your feedback is very, very important to me, so if you do appreciate this chapter, please let me know. =) Your comments are what keeps me writing.

It's 2.47 in the afternoon when Xabi boards the train. 

From his seat, Stevie smiles. By now he knows that there are exactly two minutes and 26 seconds before the departure and that that is the reason behind Xabi's panting and slightly disheveled appearance - tousled hair, flushed cheeks, wet clothes; he was late. He is always late. That is one thing that never changes.

So many things have been different for Stevie in the past... Honestly, he's lost track of the years. It seems useless to keep counting in as a small scale as days and months and years. Months and years get lost and mixed up too easily in Stevie's memory. He prefers to count in lifetimes. 

It has been now fifteen lifetimes since the last time he watched this scene unfold before him, although the details of it have always been as clear as daylight in his mind. He still remembers that twitch of irritation on Xabi's lips, the pinch between his eyebrows, the way he mutters a curse under his breath as he finally makes it to the train. As in every lifetime before, nothing disturbs Xabi more than being made to lose his poise. Stevie thinks he still looks like the perfect picture of elegance, even in a rare moment of disarray such as this one, but he's never mentioned it to Xabi before, and he'll certainly not start saying anything now for a lot of reasons, most of which are just horrible, but especially because Stevie finds it utterly adorable. 

It's a lot like sitting down to watch a movie you've seen a thousand times already, but not in a long time, and yet somehow you can still remember every scene, every dialogue, every little detail. Stevie knows exactly what will happen even before Xabi decides on what to do. He will fish his ticket out of the inner pocket on the right side of his jacket, read the number on it, then lift his head to look around the car and situate where he is. Once he confirms it's the correct car, Xabi will take a step forward, lips slightly parted now, while his eyes roam around the rows of seats in search of his.

He'll take about ten seconds to locate it, which gives Stevie just enough time to turn his face to the window and pretend not to be paying attention, not to be dying a little bit inside, as the man of his life - of all his lives - walks down the train corridor to occupy the spot exactly in front of him, a small, narrow table the only thing between the two of them. Stevie sucks the air in through his nose in a failed attempt to calm his nerves and stop his heart from beating so fast, punching violently against his ribcage.

When their eyes meet - casually for Xabi; anything but for Stevie - the Spaniard forces a small smile to the stranger in front of him in spite of his irritation. Xabi is nothing if not polite.

Stevie smiles back, soft and warmly. There's a possibility his knowing grin will look strange to Xabi - maybe too familiar, maybe too creepy - but that doesn't matter. Not this time, anyway. Stevie won't be sticking around, so it won't make a difference. This time, he'll be just another face on the train, just another stranger to cross Xabi's path. In a few weeks or maybe even days, this random encounter will be completely forgotten by the Spaniard. 

If Stevie says the cold truth of that doesn't make him feel a bit of a pang somewhere, he'll be lying. But things are what they are, and he's had ten lifetimes to get accustomed to the tragedy of their existences, the bittersweetness of this casual meeting on the 2.50pm train to Liverpool. He is ok with that. He just had to see Xabi again. One last time.

He's here to say goodbye. For good.

x-x-x

 

He met Xabi in his fourth life.

The 21st of April of 2015 is always a rainy and cold Tuesday. It's not a day that had particularly stood out in any of Stevie's previous three lives, although he did recall that it was supposed to be a rather wet week. That is relevant because it means he remembered to take the umbrella before he left the apartment, so he didn't have to run the last few hundred meters to the train station when it started pouring down.

Xabi wasn't so lucky. 

From this point on until the very last second of his very last life, Stevie will remember the 21st of April of 2015 better than any other day, of any other year, of any other lifetime.

He bought a second class ticket for the 2.50pm train to Liverpool. That's where Stevie was born, 25 or 216 years before at that point, depending on how you were counting. Stevie's fourth life was when he finally decided to go back to his origins in search of an explanation to his quaint _condition_. There are certain stages a person like him goes through, especially in the first few restarts. There's a lot of confusion, a lot of pain, a lot of loneliness. It takes a while for a re-born to get back to his best senses and learn how to cope with feelings and sensations and memories that are not actually from the current life he's living, but rather pieces that linger from the ones he had before. It's quite hard to figure out how to get a grip on that, how to differentiate the now from the before, especially if you're alone, with no one to help you through it, like he was. It can drive a person mad, literally. It happened to him on his second life.

In his fourth life, already in control of his faculties and clear of the paralyzing fear caused by incomprehension, Stevie decided to go back to his home town. Nothing guaranteed that he'd find the answers he was searching for there, but it seemed like a good place to start. Researching the nature of reborns is a tricky thing. There isn't much to start from and it's not like you can find more than just a few records of ancient legends from the XVII and XVIII centuries online. In spite of how big the libraries in London are, there was also nothing in any of the ones he'd gone to in his previous three lives. Back then Stevie didn't know, but now he understands that's all part of very minute security measures. The harder to find the reborns, the safer they are. Liverpool wouldn't answer any of his questions either - much, much later, Stevie would come to realize that his _condition_ has absolutely nothing to do with genetics or birthplace or magnetic fields or anything of the sort. It's more like... Luck. Or bad luck, depending on how you see it. Some reborns think it's a gift and it surely seems like it is in many occasions; other times, though... 

In Stevie's opinion, it is much closer to a curse than it is to a gift.

However useless for research purposes Liverpool turned out to be, the decision to go there on that particular day was by far one of the best ones he's ever made in all of his lives.

He boarded the train, put his wet umbrella aside and took his seat by the window. He was thinking of possible connections between quantum physics and ancient magic when a man got on in a hurry, some ten minutes later. He was wet and visibly displeased, but Stevie was too distracted by his own musings to offer more than two seconds of his attention to the stranger.

Then the man took the spot right across from him, offered him a quick smile as though saying _I really don't want to be impolite but I cannot be arsed to be any more sympathetic than this at the moment_ and proceeded to remove his sodden jacket. There were a few grunts as the man assessed the state of his cell phone, which had been on the inside pocket of the jacket, before he put it on the empty seat next to him, hoping that it would dry a little on the next two hours and 50 minutes.

" _Mierda_ ," came the loud expletive when the man realized his battery was dead. He touched the screen, pressed all buttons in a vain attempt at bringing the phone back to life. When none of it worked, he left the thing on the table and rubbed his face with his hands in a clear sign of dejection. Stevie remembers that was the point when he started feeling sympathetic; it was easy to see it had not been a very good day for that man, whatever the reason.

"Hey," he said. The man took his hands down and directed him a surprised look, almost like he'd forgotten for a second that there was a person watching him. "You can use mine, mate. Here."

The man glanced from the phone in Stevie's hand back to his face. Perhaps because he'd been around, or perhaps because it was just too obvious, Stevie could see the inner battle going on between the side of him that wanted to say 'No, thank you, it's not necessary' because that would probably be what the etiquette said when it came to complete strangers offering you things that aren't necessarily life or death situations, and the side that just wanted to snatch the phone away and start dialing immediately. As a form of incentive, he offered a smile and pushed the phone towards the lad, saying, "It's all right. Go ahead."

He let out a heavy gust of air and accepted the mobile. "Thank you," he said around a sigh of sheer relief. "It won't take long, I promise."

"Don't worry. Take as long as you need," he finished with a wink.

As the man talked rapidly on Spanish on the phone - a language Stevie wasn't yet fluent in by his fourth life, but that he would become by the time this same point arrived in the fifth -, Stevie took a second to actually _look_ at him for the first of many, many times. And the first thing he realized was that that was a very handsome man, indeed. He had a strong, angular jaw, and the end of his nose was maybe a little too round and his eyes were too small, but somehow what might have looked like unfortunate features on other people had come together in a perfectly harmonic way on this man. He was gorgeous and exotic. He still is. Like a movie star from the 40s or 50s. A classic and timeless sort of beauty. And that beard... 

Stevie self-consciously touched his own face. He didn't shave that morning out of sheer laziness. After three lifetimes of getting used to your own face you kind of stop paying attention to your looks. He had enough time to realize there wasn't really much he could do to change his appearance. Dressing a little better, working out, styling his hair differently... But unless he was willing to go under the knife - which he never, ever did -, that was pretty much it.

Stevie never thought of himself as a handsome man, although he was told several times, by dozens of different people, under the most varied circumstances, that he is not hard on the eye at all. In front of Xabi, however, he was always made to feel like he should make an extra effort to look more presentable. His perfectly trimmed ginger beard simply put Stevie to shame, time and time again. But, to be perfectly frank, it also put most people to shame, so that was fine. Xabi was simply on a different league.

The phone call lasted for almost five minutes - at this point in the next life, Stevie already knew enough Spanish to understand that Xabi was explaining to a business partner that he got delayed on a meeting and would be a little late for a conference he was supposed to be attending in Liverpool; in that lifetime, however, he simply tried not to look so bewildered by the rather enticing combination of peculiar and unintelligible accent and attractive face. It made Stevie want to take the man's words into his mouth - with his tongue.

"Thank you very much," he said, giving the phone back with a much bigger smile now, obviously more relaxed. Sometimes all a person needs to improve a bad day is a simple act of kindness. That's perhaps the most important trick Stevie came to learn in all his hundreds of years of living the same life over and over again. Kindness really is the secret to everything.

"No problem. It looked important."

"Yes, it really was. But it was very nice of you."

Stevie smiled. "You're welcome, then," he said, and then put one hand out for a shake. "I'm Stevie."

"Xabi," he offered, shaking Stevie's hand with a firm grip.

They didn't stop talking for the next two and a half hours. Xabi told him about his job as a museum curator, about the exhibition he was helping to put together in Liverpool, about how much he loved the Albert Dock - which, Stevie admitted, not without some embarrassment, he had never really seen in person, or at least he didn't remember seeing it, not in four lifetimes, in spite of having been born there. Xabi told him about San Sebastián and about Spain. Stevie didn't say much in return; the truth is his life was not really that interesting, if you cut out the part about living in a perpetual loop through the same course of time. Which - it would easily be the most interesting topic of conversation ever, if only he could mention it. He tried doing it in his second life, to his parents. It got him admitted to a mental institution from where he did not come out alive. Needless to say he wasn't very keen on repeating the experience.

Stevie explained he was going back to Liverpool for the first time since he was two, when his father got a job in London and they moved away not leaving a lot behind to be remembered. He didn't say _why_ or _what_ he expected to find - only that he thought it was ridiculous to be such a fervent Liverpool supporter and not know the city. Although - he still fancies Liverpool, of course, and he'll get into debates over why the Reds will always be much greater than Chelsea or Arsenal or City any time, with arguments that have been perfected over the course of hundreds of years; only it kind of gets old supporting a club through frustrating seasons you've seen countless times before. But anyway, it was still a good enough excuse to be on that train - especially because it got Xabi talking more, passionately. He liked his football, that man. His love for the sport is one of the reasons Stevie's own would be revived in this life and the next ones. And also why he would try his hand at being a professional footballer on his 15th life. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

There was an awkward moment on the platform, once they got off the train. After two hours of uninterrupted conversation, they seemed to have run out of things to say. Or rather, they knew what they were supposed to say - _"It was a pleasure to meet you, have a nice day, goodbye"_ -, they just weren't sure they wanted to.

It's not always that you meet someone with whom conversations flow so easily, so naturally, without a single drop of effort. It's only ever happened a handful of times for Stevie, although, after some time, he developed quite the skill of conversing with even the flattest and most uninteresting people in the world. Conversation is information, and information is power. That is a very important lesson for a re-born. Still, feeling comfortable around completely unfamiliar people is a rarity no matter how many lives you live. 

Reborns are probably the loneliest people on earth. It's inevitable to want to stick around those rare few. 

At that point, however, Stevie didn't really understand that very well yet; there was still a lot of hesitancy on his part, a lot of difficulties in trusting people, whoever they might be. So it was Xabi who broke the deadlock.

"Can I have your phone again, please?" he asked.

"Sure," Stevie replied, passing him the mobile.

Xabi typed in a number, took the phone to his ear and spoke only a short sentence in Spanish. Later, Stevie came to realize that it meant _'Remember to call back that number'_. "Here," Xabi said, grinning as he gave the mobile back. "Thank you."

Stevie blinked at him. "You're welcome," he said, not entirely sure he understood what Xabi had just done.

"Look, I really have to go now. I'd offer you a coffee, but..." he trailed off, pursing his lips apologetically.

Stevie nodded, a wan smile on his face. "That's all right."

"Thank you, Stevie," Xabi continued, shaking his hand again, this time for a little longer than necessary. "That was a very pleasant train ride. I wish they were always like this."

"Well, I hope you meet another fine gentleman on your ride back, then," Stevie said, good-heartedly, although his wish wasn't all that honest.

They bid farewell and each went their own way.

Stevie spent the rest of the afternoon by the docks, getting acquainted with the place Xabi spoke so enthusiastically about, and that he felt he should know by heart but didn't. It didn't take a long time there for it to become one of Stevie's favorite places in the world. It's beautiful, just as Xabi said it would be; not obviously so, like Paris or Rome. Liverpool has a different sort of charm, like all those buildings and the little streets are oozing personality. It's a proud and strong city, much like its children - even the ones who are raised miles and miles away, Stevie realized with amusement. He saw so much of himself in those dark bricks and muddy waters and liver birds, so much more than he ever saw in London, a city he knew like the back of his hand but that never felt quite _his_ , that he felt almost guilty for having waited so long to come. 

Later in the day, his cell phone rang and it was Xabi, sheepishly admitting that the last number he called was his own.

Sometimes they agree to have lunch the next day. Sometimes it's a bar for a couple of drinks (which sometimes ends up in breakfast the next morning). Sometimes it's an old pub with warm beer and cold food. 

The first time, however, their first time, on Stevie's fourth life, they had dinner that same night.

 

x-x-x

 

What he knows is this: Stevie is always born on the 30th of May in the year of 1990. He never gets to see much more than beyond 2068, the same way he doesn't know anything of what went by before the 90s other than through history books. The historical events through which he lives from his birth to his death are always the same, generally speaking, and, from the moment he leaves his mother's womb to the moment his body takes its last shuddering breath, his life is pretty much the same as anyone else's. The difference lies in what happens after that.

Death isn't the end for Stevie's kind - he now knows that he isn't alone, that there are others with this same _condition_. Stevie tried calling themselves the X-Men, but that was just a bad joke that the older members of this little club of extraordinary people didn't really appreciate. The truth is that they don't know what an X-Man is, although they pretend it's for ideological reasons that they refute any nicknames that might identify them as a unity or a species. _"It could be dangerous_ ", they say. _"Can you imagine what they'd do to us if they knew there are people living out there carrying knowledge of the future?"_ , and, well. It makes sense. It's a scary thought. Stevie still likes the idea of them as a bunch of mutants, though. And in any case, nobody knows what they are, so _mutants_ is as good a guess as any.

From time to time, one of the _mutants_ decides to go rogue and revolt against the _Complexity Is Your Excuse For Inaction_ rule. Because it's too hard to predict what will happen if they interfere too much with the course of events, they simply don't do anything. Changing election results, stopping great catastrophes, building technology way before its time, killing someone who's supposed to do something important before they do it... It can get hard to explain _why_ you're not supposed to kill Hitler or alert someone of the terrorists just waiting to board airplanes across America on the 9/11. Some people have tried that before, and the consequences were cataclysmic. Certain things are just sort of a fixed point in time; they're there for a reason. Not all of them are good, but it is what it is. Mess with it and you risk starting something much, much worse. 

Time is such a fragile and volatile thing; hassle too much with it and it will certainly come back to bite you in the ass. Besides, if you stop a _mutant_ from being born before he comes to the world, like say killing the mother before the baby is born, that mutant will _never_ be born again. That's how you finish them, for good - you stop them from being born _before_ they are, in any given life. And if there's one thing mutants do is look out for each other. If you change the timeline, you might prevent the birth of other _mutants_ , and that - well, simply putting, that is murdering your own kind, which is absolutely unacceptable. Do whatever the hell you want with your life - wanna be a pimp? sell drugs? go to war? steal a bank? all fine -, kill as many common people as you want, they'll always be back where they started when you revive anyway. But _do not_ mess with the Special Ones. That is the only back-off point.

Still, no amount of warnings is sufficient to stop all of them from taking their chances and interfering with the future every now and again, either intentionally or by accident, for noble purposes or rather dire ones. Killing Hitler before the war doesn't stop the mass murder of Jews, it only makes the Nazi believe they have an _honorable_ reason to keep going, thus making the death camps more violent and faster in the elimination of its prisoners. Even the absolute best of intentions can go wrong when you bend the rules. Interference can only happen in small scales - save lives close to you, find a way of helping those in need, avoid the deaths of innocents, but don't try to simply change the entire course of history.

In the end, though, as long as nothing _too_ extreme happens, it doesn't matter much. The so called _cataclysms_ that really do alter the future in drastic manners, preventing the birth of hundreds of reborns, have only happened twice, as far as the knowledge of the reborns go, and both many, many centuries before. Being things as they are now, as soon as Stevie dies that timeline immediately ceases to exist to him and, when he comes back, everything is exactly as it was before. It’s like being resurrected in a new alternate universe that starts out exactly where the one before, and only the future decision he and other reborn make on that particular timeline will change what comes afterwards.

Stevie's life changes from loop to loop, of course, because he doesn't always do the same things, doesn't always meet the same people or go to the same places. 

His first three lives were sheer madness.

The first one remains as the most unique out of them all, certainly very different from everything that came afterwards. It was the only life Stevie got to spend in its entirety as an ordinary person, sharing all of the same fears and insecurities and frustrations of the average mortal human being. Completely undistinguished. Nothing about it was remarkable, but Stevie still keeps the memories close to his heart. Those were very different days, easier and far more innocent. Stevie was only ever really a child once, and it was during his first life. There's a certain beauty in experiencing life with that sort of fresh eyes, not knowing what lies ahead of you every single step of the way. 

First day at school, learning how to write and read, his first trip to the beach, his first kiss... Stevie got to live through these things at least 25 times, but the truth is that it was never the same. Reborns are incredibly frustrated adults trapped in infants' bodies waiting desperately for the day when they won't need the help of their parents to get by anymore. No one can even imagine how hard it is spending years every single time trying not to look like an absolute genius, with skills that are way ahead of his age. That is usually how you attract unwanted attention, and it can sometimes freak people out. Stevie’s heard countless stories of people who had to spend entire lifetimes as lab monkeys, being studied and dissected and explored ‘till the day they died. Humans are the cruelest of beings when they feel threatened and usually what threatens them is the possibility of having anything out there that might be stronger or more evolved than they are. The whole thing about _love_ and _happiness_ being the main goals in anyone’s lives is bullshit told to satisfy the needs of common people; put _power_ in front of a man and you’ll see his true form.

But anyway…

For all the direction it sort of lacked, there was also a kind of happiness in Stevie’s first life that he never managed to taste again. Oblivion is much too underestimated in his opinion.

That life was also the only life where he struggled with his sexuality, the only lifetime where he ever had a girlfriend. Her name was Alex and she was stunning, but it only took Stevie five months of going out with her to know that her looks didn't really affect him the same way it seemed to affect all the other boys his age, and that he loved her company because she was fun and a good friend, but not much more than that. In all his lives after that, Stevie started kissing boys from a very young age, and mostly because he got bored waiting for that train trip where he'd meet the only boy he really wanted to kiss. He couldn't just sit around for more than two decades doing nothing every single time. And, well. He might not be entirely human in certain aspects, but he still goes through very hormonal phases in puberty and his physical needs are the same as anyone else's. 

On his original life, his first boy happened at the age of 18. His name was Danny. Stevie met him through a common friend, Jamie, who is probably one of Stevie's favorite people in the world, ever. They don't always get to become best mates, sometimes life just takes Stevie elsewhere. But whenever they are reunited, it's always brilliant. Danny, on the other hand, nice though he was, never showed up on any of Stevie's next lives. He just couldn't be arsed to go through the trouble of having a boyfriend he never really cared that much for. That only ever makes sense when you don't really know what you're doing and a nice enough guy comes along and you think 'Yeah, ok, it could happen'. Once your standards become way higher, that sort of time-wasting relationship loses all of its sparkle. Danny still gets to be the first of the firsts, though. Stevie doesn't remember all of his first kisses, but he does remember Danny, so that is something.

He met the man with whom he spent most of his first life with at a Christmas party in 2022. Back then, Stevie didn't think love could ever be stronger than what he felt for Michael. Of course Stevie had no idea of his own condition back then, was only as old as his birth certificate stated, an easily impressionable young man. 

They got married three years later and stayed that way for the next 15 years, when Michael met a much younger lad by the inspiring name of _Raúl_ and got on a plane to somewhere with warmer weather and more tanned bodies. Stevie received a post card with a lame ass apology some two years later, which - honestly, what kind of asshole does that? A _post card_ from the beach to justify leaving your husband? What the hell did he expect Stevie to think of that? ' _Oh, yeah, that beach looks really nice. Now I understand why he had to do it, I would've left him for that too'_. 

That was Stevie's first ever heartbreak. It was _bad_ and it made him grumpy and disenchanted with life in general afterwards, but, in hindsight, it wasn't even that horrible. He's had much worse since. It was, however, enough to guarantee that he never wanted to see Michael's face, ever again. Of course he's completely over all that by now, but Michael was kind of a dark stain on his only normal, completely human life, so he does hold a bit of a grudge, maybe. Although - if you think about it, nothing screams _Human Experience_ more than having you heart shredded to pieces by a good looking asshole at least once. So there is that, too.

Stevie wonders how different things might have been on his following lives if Michael hadn't left him. Maybe the one event he would keep going back to would be that Christmas party instead of the 2.50pm train to Liverpool. He should probably thank Michael for being a jerk one day. Just track him down, shake his hand on the street and say ' _Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy the beach_ ' and walk away. 

Then came his second life and everything that he went through with Michael was put under perspective. Stevie would rather live through 1000 Michaels than have to go through anything like his second life again. That life still haunts him, 20 lifetimes later. To this day, it is, by some distance, the most harrowing of them all. It also holds the record for his youngest death: only 15. 

The first rebirth is the hardest one. The memories start coming back around the age of three. By the time he's five, he can already remember everything. Imagine being a five year-old with perfect recollection of pain, agony, fear - and _death_. He remembered being stuck in a hospital bed for weeks, going in and out of surgeries, before his heart finally gave in, at the age of 78. 

Imagine remembering being 78 when you're only five.

Needless to say, it wasn't a very happy childhood.

Stevie suffered with horrible migraines that would last for days and leave him completely incapacitated, cried all the time, woke up shaking and screaming almost every night because of the nightmares that weren't really nightmares at all, but rather memories coming back to him, loud and clear as though it had all happened yesterday - which, in a way, it sort of almost did. He was basically afraid of everything. The first ten years of his second existence were spent cruising from clinic to clinic and doctor to doctor and no one could tell what was wrong with him, no one could _understand_. From a medical point of view, he was absolutely healthy. Even the heaviest doses of medication didn't seem to erase all traces of his _disease_ , whatever it was.

When he was twelve, a psychiatrist finally recommended that he was admitted into a facility for people with severe cases of mental disorders. They couldn't pinpoint what his case was, but the most commonly accepted theory was that his was an early development of acute schizophrenia. He never came home from that facility.

His memories from that time are both terrible and hazy. They kept him heavily sedated and tied down to a bed for the largest part of the first few years due to 'aggressive behavior'. In a way, it was best that they did that. Stevie's days were literally hell, but at least it became hard to remember them precisely, with so many drugs clouding his thoughts. 

One day, three years after his admission, when they were convinced that Stevie was making progress and did not pose as a threat to his fellow crazy inmates or himself, he managed to steal a knife from the kitchen. He went for the femoral artery and bled out before anyone knew what was happening. Dying never felt quite as much as a relief as it did that second time.

His third life was calmer, in a way. It wasn't a shock when memories started to come back, although the traumas of his second life were much harder to process and handle than the harmless remembrance of his original life. Stevie still didn't know what was happening to him, but at least this time he already knew what to expect, enough to avoid the outbursts that could potentially lead to false schizophrenia diagnosis.

What happened was that in his third life Stevie was a much quieter boy. He was smart, of course, because he could do things no other kid his age could, and he was very lovely to his parents, never gave them a single day of trouble. But he spent most of his time alone and in silent meditation. Before the internet became a really useful tool, Stevie would stay for hours and hours hidden in the depths of libraries all over London, researching. He found some evidence that he wasn't alone, that there were more people like him - it wasn't anything documented, though, but rather secret signs and messages that only knowing eyes could identify.

In his third life, Stevie became a professor. He never married, never had any long time partners. There were a few short affairs here and there, but nothing meaningful. All his time was dedicated to research and teaching, which he found incredibly therapeutic. Discussing the problems of paradoxes and time travel with people who could only conceive the idea in theory was a wonderful way to pass the time and also to try and theorize what the hell was going on. Stevie came to terms with what he was, regardless of comprehension, and, by the time he felt his last days were approaching, he actually started making plans for his next life, assuming that it would happen again. What he'd do, where he'd go. 

The first thing he decided was that he'd spend some time in Liverpool, the one place he hadn't dared to touch so far.

 

x-x-x

Xabi died on a Wednesday in September.

Three and a half years after the journey on the 2.50pm train to Liverpool, Stevie was waiting for Xabi at home with dinner when he got the call from the hospital. The food had grown cold already, and Xabi wasn't answering his phone, but Stevie wasn't too worried. Xabi frequently had to work overhours at the museum and, regardless of how many lives of attempts you give Apple, iPhones always have shitty batteries. It wouldn't be the first time Xabi missed dinner because of a last minute piece that had to be catalogued or something of the sort.

Only it was nothing like that.

Stevie never found out who the person on the other end was - if it was a police officer, or a doctor, or a social worker, or whoever - but the exact words spoken to him on that phone call are still vivid on his mind: "Mr. Alonso has been on an accident. We understand you are the only person listed as his emergency contact in the country, Mr. Gerrard, so we need you to come to the hospital as soon as possible, please." There was a pause, the longest of Stevie's life, during which everything felt suspended and his heart stopped beating, and then, "I'm afraid it's terrible news."

Stevie thought he knew heartbreak thanks to Michael in his first life; he thought he knew pain from all his years of incarceration and medical torture in his second life; he thought he knew loneliness from spending an entire lifetime alone in his third life. In his fourth life, Stevie came to realize he didn't really know any of that.

Xabi's death devastated him in a way that nothing ever had before. Yes, his second life had been absolute horror, but it was a different sort of situation. Trust isn't something that comes easily for people like Stevie, and he reckons it's not a walk in the park for other people to accept him with his weirdnesses and awkward behaviors either. With Xabi everything just... Clicked. It felt right, straight from the beginning. They had this instant chemistry that turned into a sort of bond that turned into confidence that turned into love. A love Stevie had certainly never known before. 

Eternity gives you new perspectives. As soon as Stevie realized what he was, this constant in a world of variables, absolutely everything shrunk into insignificance. When you have literally _forever_ to go through the same places, the same people, the same events, over and over and over, it just stops being important. But not Xabi. Never Xabi.

Xabi made life more bearable. He made Stevie laugh and loosen up, cracked his hard-shell of suspicions and fear. He made Stevie _forget_ that he was meant to wander about life with a frown on his face, not caring about anything or anyone. Xabi was actually the one thing that brought some color back into a meager existence, made Stevie finally see the beauty in _living_ , rather than just passing by an entire lifetime as though he were on a mission. It's like he had been seeing everything through a blurry, black-and-white glass before, like he couldn't feel the taste of anything, until Xabi came along and reminded him of what it was like to be a human being again.

He made Stevie _happy_ in a time when he'd completely forgotten what that was supposed to feel like, when he'd stopped thinking of life as something you should _enjoy_ , but rather endure. Xabi brought him back from what would likely turn out to be an irreversible path towards complete indifference towards everything and everyone. Stevie's soul was dying and Xabi saved him.

And then Stevie lost him.

Xabi looked so peaceful and relaxed with his eyes closed Stevie could've believed he was only sleeping. So beautiful, so still, so pale... So lifeless. Not a breath left in him. His lips felt cold when they had been warm and smiling just that morning. Stevie remembers that scene as though he'd watched it from above, like in a movie. 

Xabi died before he even got to the hospital. A car crash, they said. It wasn't even that bad, but Xabi wasn't wearing his seatbelt and hit his head pretty hard against the wheel. The only indication of a trauma, however, was a tiny little cut on his forehead.

What Stevie remembers most from that moment was the huge sense of loneliness that had fallen upon him like a cloak. The world suddenly felt too big and he felt too small. He knew, of course, that he'd always be able to go back to the 2.50pm train on the 21st of April of 2015. But he also knew that that Xabi, rushing into the train just two minutes before departure, would not be _his_ Xabi. Not yet, anyway. That Xabi wouldn't know him, wouldn't miss him, wouldn't love him. They'd have to start over from scratch, and Stevie knew, he just _knew_ , that the minute he locked eyes with Xabi on that train and could not find even the smallest hint of recognition there, his heart would break all over again.

The comprehension that not all the love in the world can cut the edges and reduce the abysm of difference that exists between Stevie and almost every other person in the universe killed him. When the world simply stops being, Stevie keeps moving, always moving, never stopping.

Even surrounded by people, even in Xabi's arms, even with others like him going through the exact same thing - Stevie is, at all times, the loneliest man in the world.

At that point, Stevie considered suicide. Not for relief, as it had been in his second life, but simply because he didn't want to keep going without Xabi. That life stopped making sense. Going back to his research just felt idiotic, meaningless. He didn't go through with it, though. There would be a 25 years wait before he could be reunited with Xabi anyway, and it was best that he learned how to cope with the pain of loss before he went into the next loop. He didn't want to be a grieving child.

The sadness that took shelter in his chest and never really dissolved finally took him back to the year 1990 at the age of 71, under the form of a massive heart attack.

 

x-x-x

When Xabi boarded the train in Stevie's fifth life, all wet and annoyed and _alive_ , it took a lot for Stevie not to run straight to the other man and wrap his arms around him. It was quite a battle with the tears welling up in his eyes as well. He prepared for the moment as best as he could in order to avoid coming out as a complete weirdo and scaring Xabi away. In the end, he resorted to simply staring while he waited for his cue - _'Here, mate, you can use my phone'_ \- and was lucky enough that Xabi was so distracted by his own misfortunes that he didn't notice the creeper sitting across from him.

That time, Stevie decided not to take things so slowly. He and Xabi moved in together little over a year after they started dating and the next two years were absolutely blissful. Stevie was working as a football coach for kids in that life, something he started doing as a hobby to pass the time in his adolescence and came to realize he really, _really_ enjoyed. It didn't pay that well, but money stopped being a problem for Stevie pretty soon into his rebirths. There are dozens of ways of making it, either in small amounts or a fortune all at once, if the necessity arises. A few lucky bets here and there usually do the trick. Most mutants like spending their lifetimes collecting fortunes, becoming richer and richer on each lifetime. Stevie, he thinks it gets boring, being a millionaire every single time. He's done that, of course, in various different ways, but he appreciates having to work for a living every now and then. It keeps him grounded, if that's even possible for a person like him.

Between a job he liked and the man he loved, Stevie would say his fifth life was going wonderfully well - until that fateful Wednesday in September emerged on their horizon.

Weeks before the incident, Stevie felt like a zombie, barely sleeping at night and then spending his entire day lost in deviations. Xabi would always wake up to find him perched over a computer or staring into nothing, his mind reeling back to all those years ago, before those versions of him and Xabi were even born yet. 

"What's going on with you?" Xabi asked one morning, during breakfast, eight days away from that night.

"What?" he asked, blinking out of his reverie.

There were tiny creases on Xabi's brow, his lips pursed and his eyes sparkling as his brain worked to try and figure Stevie out, understand what was going through his mind. Xabi was like that; he liked to understand things and when he didn't, it frustrated him. Stevie, he posed as a challenge, a constant one. That was probably one of the things Stevie always found most extraordinary about his partner of so many lives; in spite of all his efforts to be as normal as possible, Xabi was smart enough to _know_ there was something different, something shining from within Stevie, a light that escaped through the little cracks on his well-practiced façade as an indication that there was more beneath all the layers. Xabi looked at him like he could read his soul - like he loved what he saw there as much as he loved the rest of him, only he didn't quite know how to interpret it, not in any ways that made sense to his mere moral head. Stevie didn't have to pretend around Xabi. It was useless, anyway.

"You've been acting weird for weeks. I can tell you're worried about something," his boyfriend calmly explained.

The correct and obvious answer to that would've been _yes, I am_ , but he couldn't give a good excuse as to why, so instead Stevie went with, "Nonsense." Which - obviously, did not convince Xabi in the least.

"Well, do you want to tell me what that crying after sex was all about, then?" Xabi casually retorts - and, well. _Touché_.

Stevie had to hide his face behind the hem of his coffee mug after that because, in fact, that did happen. Stress was leaving him on edge all the time. He honestly felt like a pregnant woman, except in his case it wasn't the hormones cocking him up, it was the nerves. 

He wanted to justify himself by saying it was just a coincidence that the crying happened during sex, because, in fact, it had been happening _all the time_ , _everywhere_ , especially when Xabi wasn't around to notice. But, well. That would've probably not helped his cause much.

"It's nothing," he shrugged. 

Xabi stopped then, very quiet, eyes narrowed just that tiny bit before asking, "Have I done something to upset you?"

It would make everything so much easier if he could just _say it_. ' _Listen, Xabs. You're supposed to die in a car crash in eight days. Don't ask me how I know, just trust me on this one, ok? So do me a favor and stay the fuck away from cars for the next three weeks, yes? Better yet - don't touch a car for an entire month. Take the public transport. Just to make sure._ '

Stevie trusted Xabi in a way he'd never trusted anyone before, not since becoming aware of his condition, but he still held the very vivid memories of what he was treated like when he told his parents of the things he knew from the future - how scared _of him_ they became when some of the things he said turned out to be true. They accepted an obviously misguided schizophrenia diagnosis just so they wouldn't have to deal with him anymore - just so they wouldn't have to believe that what he was saying was real, that their son wasn't like everyone else's sons. It's too much for a normal person to handle. If not even his parents, his very loving, very righteous parents, could accept a son with a twisted and inexplicable condition, why would Xabi? 

He could not stand the thought of having Xabi become afraid of him as well. It would change everything between them - and Stevie _needed_ what they had much more than he needed to share his secret.

"Don't be daft, Xabi," he replied instead, not meeting his boyfriend's eyes. "It's nothing to do with you, it's just - it's nothing. I'm just feeling a little sick, 's all. I'll be all right in no time."

Xabi wasn't pleased with that answer and he insisted on going back to the subject whenever the opportunity arised, which meant Stevie had to work double hard on concealing his anxiety and keeping the turbulence all on the inside.

He was moderately successful at it for about a week. Then the day had finally come and it was impossible not to panic.

Stevie was so nervous he spent the entire night bent over the toilet, throwing up things from two lives before. His body was burning with a fever that had nothing to do with a virus, as he later allowed Xabi to believe.

Xabi found him doubled over on the bathroom floor with an acute pain in his stomach, trying to catch his breath after yet another round of vomiting. After a futile attempt at trying to convince Stevie to see a doctor, they went back together to bed, and Stevie held on to his boyfriend with so much strength Xabi was having a hard time breathing.

"Please, don't leave me," he mumbled, abandoning all shreds of dignity.

"It's all right, Steven, I'm here," he whispered, caressing his head, as Stevie sobbed against his chest. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Don't leave me," he kept repeating.

Of course what he meant was, ' _Please don't die'_ , but what Xabi understood was, _'I'm such a baby when I get sick I'm afraid I'll die if I stay alone'_. In fact, his reaction was so convincingly worrisome that Xabi called the museum in the morning and announced he wouldn't be showing up for work that day - ' _Family emergency._ '

Stevie felt like he was breathing for the first time in weeks after that.

Frankly, there were probably hundreds of ways he could've deployed to keep Xabi away from cars on that Wednesday, but he was so affected by anxiety - a condition he believes he was made prone to by all the trauma of his second life - that he was simply left incapable of reacting with reason.

The important part, however, was that it worked. Xabi did not leave the apartment and he did not die. Stevie was lulled into sleep by the sound of his boyfriend's slow and steady heartbeat. He was _alive_. To hell with dignity.

Four months later, however, he could not stop it again.

Xabi said, "I'm going to the supermarket. Do you want anything?", while Stevie was in the shower. He thought for a moment and said, "Beer".

That was the last thing he said to Xabi in that life. Beer. The next time he saw Xabi, it was again on a hospital stretcher, again with a sheet covering his body, again pale and cold and lifeless.

"The car did not stop on the red light", a doctor said. "The hit was too violent. We tried reviving him three times, but..."

Stevie stopped listening at that point.

Xabi was dead again.

 

x-x-x

In his sixth life, Stevie stopped the car accident, stopped the hit-and-run and got another year with Xabi. He was almost allowing himself to quit the paranoia and believe that they'd finally make it unscathed through an entire lifetime when the phone rang on a Thursday night and he already knew what it was before the man on the other end even told him.

There's a pattern to how people deliver bad news, particularly for professionals. No one really notices that sort of thing because no one's ever expecting to receive a phone call from a complete stranger saying that a beloved one has died. But once you grow accustomed to it, you can tell. And it is definitely not something anyone forgets easily. The somber tone of voice, the slow, measured enunciation, that small stop before the use of certain key words that will denounce the matter of the call - _accident, crash, hospital_. 

"Mr. Gerrard," the first pause. "I'm afraid there's been an incident involving Mr. Xabi Alonso." Another pause. "We need you to come down to the hospital."

Xabi was shot. He was out having a pint with his colleagues after work and went out - apparently - to call his boyfriend and let him know he'd be late, that he shouldn't wait up. A man showed up out of nowhere and tried to take his cell phone. Xabi reacted out of instinct and, it turned out, the man was armed. He shot him twice, one in the arm, the second in the chest. The people at the pub heard the gunshot and rushed to help him, but it was too late. The bullet pierced right through his heart.

"He probably didn't feel anything," the doctor said, probably because he thought that sort of information offers some kind of solace to the family. _He wasn't in pain_. Fuck that. Xabi had died in pain before, he'd died instantly, he'd died and died and died. It didn't matter whether it was fast or not - what mattered was that he kept on dying.

It didn't matter how hard Stevie tried, Xabi kept on slipping through his fingers way too soon. Every time he managed to stop a death, Stevie would get a few months here, another year there, like a small reward for his efforts. But then something would come completely out of nowhere and there was just nothing he could do.

 _Why_ couldn't he save Xabi?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So AO3 is kinda sucky at the moment. Took me a couple of attempts to update this, but here we are. First of all, I lied about the chapter count. I didn’t mean to, but I did. Story just kept on growing and I didn’t want 5 billion words per chapter again. So I decided to cut it in half once more. I promise it won’t go further than three chapters. I’m almost done with the story anyway, so the next update should be here soon (if AO3 allows it).
> 
> Second of all, I’m really sorry for my English and all the mistakes you will surely find. They’re all my own and I tried to catch as many errors as possible but my English is really not that good. I apologize!  
> Last but not least, if you like this, please let me know! I really appreciate your comments, it’s a huge incentive to me. Thank you for reading. =)

Steven Gerrard had Doc Brown and Marty McFly to thank for providing him with a solution to all his problems.

Really, it was all a matter of thinking about timelines and how to bend them at your will. Of course having a time-traveling DeLorean would help quicken up the process a lot, but in the absence of that, all he had to do was use his knowledge of future events as a tool in his own advantage.

If he couldn't keep Xabi alive long enough, he'd just have to go the other way and compensate for the time they could never get in the future by finding him sooner. It was a simple matter of logic.

If Xabi was just going to keep dying no matter what he did, Stevie had to get to him before the 2.50pm train to Liverpool and try and change the progression of events from there on, creating an alternative timeline by modifying the starting point and maybe, just maybe, preventing Xabi from having an encounter with death every time he turned a corner. It's also entirely possible that he had just been watching way too much Back To The Future - that was _such_ a great movie - but it didn't _sound_ like a crazy idea. At least not at the time. Of course he didn't know how much direr consequences can be once you try to mess with the natural progression of time. Mother Nature has no sympathy for people trying to cheat her. Theoretically speaking, however, it was a perfect plan. 

The problem was that Stevie knew very little of where exactly Xabi would be years before the 21st of April of 2015. Three lifetimes with a person, you'd expect him to know everything there was to know about Xabi, right? Wrong. He didn't know for sure _when_ Xabi would arrive in the country - he knew it would happen in 2010, but he didn't know in what month - and he didn't know exactly _where_ Xabi would take up residence upon his arrival, only roughly the area, and only because Xabi mentioned places he used to go to and some of his favorite cafés and restaurants on a couple of occasions. But that, of course, only offered Stevie a perimeter, not a precise location.

So what Stevie did was, came January 2010, he rented a flat in the neighborhood where he believed his chances of randomly bumping into Xabi tended to be fatter and started hanging out at all his favorite spots.

Brilliant, wasn’t it?

Stevie began with the Buddha Café. 

The Buddha was a very quirky little Asian-themed café, where people sat on soft puffs around very low tables to have their drinks and use the internet. They served very alternative types of coffee, imported grains from small producers in third world countries and sold pastries by local suppliers that were absolutely delicious. The shop was owned by an idealistic former corporate wolf that abandoned a life of wealth, 12-hours daily shifts and devouring smaller businesses after a life-changing epiphany and decided to embrace the simple and sustainable side of the Force. A really nice background story for an indie café, but the kind of thing Stevie tended to raise his eyebrows at. The end of the whole one-life-to-live situation turned him into a cynical of sorts.

But that's not saying he didn’t appreciate the guy's new venture, because he really did. It was a very nice café. Stevie took a liking to it almost instantaneously; the food was great, the atmosphere was great, and even the regular clientele was oddly pleasant, even if just to look at. He could see how Xabi would like it there; everyone who came in reminded Stevie of him, a little bit, in one way or another. He'd fit right into.

But perhaps the reason why he became so fond of the Buddha, what he came to like the most about it, was Finns. 

Finns was... Well, many things. 

For starters, he was a barista with a reputation amongst London's coffee loving community. His TripAdvisor reviews were insane. His nametag said Stephen, but Stevie noticed pretty quickly that nobody ever called him that. Everyone who went to the Buddha either knew the place for so long that they were already used to the barista's nickname, or they had ventured on a trip there precisely because of him. Best coffee in east London, some would say. Stevie, he'd always been very skeptical about coffee; his would be consumed only whenever he felt in need of a bomb of caffeine. The stronger, the better. He was appreciative of the practicality and usefulness of the drink, but not a devotee, as so many people seem to be. Finns changed all that, of course. He converted Stevie into a passionate defender of the fine art of coffee-making, an intricate connoisseur of all the nuance of the drink and a demanding admirer as well.

Finns was also a breath of fresh air in Stevie's otherwise sad and lonely Xabiless life.

At that point in his everlasting existence, Stevie was already so corrupted by pain and loss, so cynical in the face of how ugly and lonely the world could be, that Finns annoyed him at first. It just didn't seem possible for someone to be _so nice_. With time, though, Stevie realized that what he perceived as an effort to be liked was actually just a natural mindset towards kindness. Finns was just an all-around good person, the type that is so hard to find, no matter how many lifetimes you have. He never had to try too hard; he was just there, making coffee, smiling at people, remembering their names and wishing them a good day, and for some reason that seemed to brighten up the mood of absolutely everyone. There was a feel-good bubble inside the Buddha, and the name of that bubble was Stephen Finnan. “ _Please, call me Finns!_ ”

Stevie, of course, wasn't the only one to become obsessed with that man. Everyone liked him: the café regulars, the newcomers, the neighbors, the bosses, the homeless people at the shelter where he volunteered at every week. Because of course he was _that_ much of a nice guy. Finns would spend the entire morning on his day-offs serving coffee to the homeless (which meant his day-offs got rather busy, since some people would cross the city just to have a bit of his dark liquid magic for breakfast) and, after every shift, he’d pack all the food they couldn’t sell at the café and take it to the shelter.

Stevie wasn't a stranger to charity work, but there was something simply heartwarming in watching how natural the whole thing was to Finns. There was no self-satisfaction or sense of personal gain in anything he did; it wasn’t about _him_. Finns just wanted to help out if he could, whichever way he could. It was as simple as that.

Finns was the person who taught Stevie that, sometimes, an act of kindness is all it takes to make someone's day better. It might not change a lot in the grand scheme of things, but being kind is the least anyone can do, and it doesn't cost a thing. Just be kind to the world, and the world will be kind in return.

If you ask Stevie what he remembers the most about Finns, it has to be his smile. He smiled so easily it was kind of infectious. Finns' smile and a cup of his coffee was all it took to start improving a bad day. Stevie honestly can't remember ever seeing Finns looking dejected or in a bad mood as he worked. Not that he never felt that way, it was just that he understood the effect he had on people, or at least the power of having someone offering you something as genuine and unguarded as an honest smile when you're going through a rough patch, and he decided to take that responsibility upon himself.

Finns had his bad days just as everyone else, but he just was... Happy. He wasn't rich, he had to work his ass off every day behind that counter, he didn't have everything he wanted from life, not all his dreams came true, not all his plans worked for the best, but Finns was _happy_. It was a state of spirit. And in a world of indifference and bleakness, happy people can be just addictive, Stevie came to find out. 

Stevie was like the complete opposite in that scale. He's not anymore. Not right now, anyway, for reasons that will be discussed in due time. But back then, yes. He was never happy, even when he was. Happiness was something he had to wait 25 years to find only to become terrified of having it taken away from him. Loving something as much as Stevie loved Xabi was destructive. At the same time it made him whole and gave him purpose, it ruined him for absolutely every other possibility. So what Finns represented to him was... The unattainable. What he couldn't have. It was a freedom he could never experience. Stevie was chained to tragedy, and so he felt attracted to Finns' happiness like a moth drawn to the flames, envious and mesmerized, hoping that some of that light would rub off on him if he spent enough time around Finns.

If there was one thing Stevie needed after lifetimes of loss, it was to rest his mind and his heart, give it time to heal. He needed a little bit of magic, and Finns was exactly that.

Which is why Finns was also the reason why Stevie's plans for his seventh life changed so drastically.

It didn't take long after Stevie started hanging out at Xabi's future favorite places for the Buddha Café to stand out, not only because it did really look like somewhere Xabi could spend hours at, reading a book while calmly sipping from a mug, but also - and mostly - because Stevie quickly became friends with the barista. Or rather, the barista quickly started treating him as a friend, which is an entirely different thing. Usually, Stevie's reserve, which almost translates into aloofness at times, sends enormous _back off_ signals. So great in fact that most people simply don't bother trying to approach - which, well, is sort of the point. Stevie doesn't want to drag people into his life if he can avoid it. Too complicated, too hard to handle. Finns, however, was not frightened by the cool nonchalance of the new regular guest. Before he noticed, Stevie was stopping by the café nearly every day, taking the same spot by the counter and talking away entire afternoons while Finns worked.

Sometimes he'd stay until the end of Finns' shift and go with him to the shelter to help out with the food; or they'd hit a pub together and laugh for hours and hours at everything and nothing; or Stevie would simply walk with him to the nearest tube station. They never ran out of topics to discuss, and Stevie never ran out of interest. Between Finns' charisma and his wit, they made quite the formidable pair.

In hindsight, it seems only too obvious, but it took him a long time to realize that what was happening there was more than just friendship. Well, it certainly started out like that, but it didn't last too long that way. Perhaps because he was so used to the unique idea of Xabi as a romantic interest, it never even crossed his mind that what he and Finns had been doing for eight months was, in fact, a very slow-cooking version of _flirting_. And the perception was kind of forced onto him when, one day, as they walked side by side to the tube, same as every other night, Finns kissed him.

Stevie was in the middle of saying something when he noticed Finns had stopped. He turned around to find the other man a few steps back, jaw set into determination, a strange fire in his green eyes as he stared at Stevie as though he were trying to see through him or read his mind. Stevie blinked at him. "What?" 

Finns didn't say anything; he simply cut the distance between them with purposeful steps, took Stevie's face in his hands and crushed their lips together. And Stevie... Well, he froze. Thinking back, it was probably an awful experience for Finns, poor thing. There he was, making the bold decision of finally making a move on a guy who was sending out very confusing signals, and the guy wasn't even kissing him back. In fact, Stevie wasn't doing much of anything, really. He didn't part his mouth to allow Finns to deepen the kiss, he didn't put his hands anywhere, he didn't even close his eyes. He was just... Petrified.

The first time Stevie ever saw anything resembling sadness on that man's eyes, it was right after he pulled away from that kiss. "Oh, God," Finns muttered, shaking his head and immediately looking away from Stevie. "I'm so sorry. I don't - I don't know what I was thinking, that was just... I'm sorry. I have to... I should go."

He didn't even wait for Stevie to say anything before dashing off and disappearing down the tube station. 

Kissing Finns felt a lot like cheating on Xabi, which, objectively, was just ridiculous. The Xabi who existed in his seventh life at that point didn't even know who the hell he was. And there were no guarantees at all that he'd even find Xabi before the 21st of April of 2015, so, possibly, he still had _years_ before they'd even meet. Besides, Stevie had kissed dozens of other people, before and after Xabi, in every life since they met. It was not like he had become celibate in the absence of the love of his life. It was tricky trying to figure out why the thing with Finns bothered him so much, why it felt so _wrong_. But eventually he did.

The truth was that Finns wasn't like all the other people in Stevie's lives. Kissing him was a betrayal because he _liked_ Finns. Unbeknown to him, Stevie had developed certain feelings for someone who wasn't Xabi and that was... Frankly, it was really scary. Not to mention confusing as hell. Finns caught him completely by surprise with that kiss, and when his heart started racing and that little flurry of excitement started coursing through him, Stevie's reaction had been to freeze instead of following his instincts and taking action. He hadn't realized how much he wanted to kiss Finns right until the second Finns kissed him, and then, after it happened, Stevie simply couldn't think about anything else. That interest wasn't born out of simple need or physical attraction - it _flourished_ , growing out of a deep-rooted affection and a huge sense of mutual respect and admiration. 

And that changed absolutely _everything_.

It had been eight months since Stevie moved into Xabi's alleged neighborhood and there was still no sign of him. He knew for a fact that the man he loved would walk through the doors of the Buddha Café at some point, but he had no way to precise when. And as he waited, he happened to meet someone who caught his attention in ways no one really had before, other than Xabi. 

What to do, then?

Well, the first thing was to apologize. Stevie felt horrible for how he'd reacted. Mostly because he made Finns feel horrible. And the feeling was only aggravated when he didn't find Finns at the café the next day. Instead, it was Harry, the guy from the morning shift, who Stevie sometimes hung out with in their group outings and who he always thought had a thing for Finns (which, all of a sudden, was very disturbing), standing behind the counter.

"Hey, Gerrard!" Harry greeted him with his characteristic charm. Stevie liked Harry and his Australian accent just fine, but the sight of him right then was deeply worrisome and it must've shown on Stevie's face, somehow, because Harry's smile faltered for a second and he spoke, lowly, just for Stevie's ears, "He asked me if I could cover for him today."

"Oh," was all Stevie managed to reply. He wasn't sure how much Harry knew, or how much he should let transpire.

"He said he was feeling a little sick," Harry continued, with a shrug. "I offered to stop by after work to check on him, but - here's your coffee, love. Have a good day," he said, handing a cup to a woman who was waiting by the counter as well, before turning back to Stevie. "Maybe you should go. I think he'd like that."

"Me?" Stevie asked, a little taken aback. "Why do you say that?"

"Come on," Harry said, smirking in a soft manner, if that was even possible, and left it at that.

He _should _go and talk to Finns, if anything because he knew for a fact that Finns wasn't sick, just trying to avoid seeing him, and that was... Well. Finns never missed a day at the café. Enough said. But the mere fact he'd played the sick card meant to Stevie that Finns simply didn't want to see him, and, after that awful demonstration the night before, he shouldn't try to force his presence upon the other man. Especially because he wasn't sure of what to say - for some reason, he had the impression that _'I'm really sorry I didn't kiss you back, I really wanted to, I think I'm really attracted to you, but I love his other guy who I haven't technically met yet and I'm very confused about how you make me feel'_ was not gonna cut it.__

__Stevie decided to give Finns - and himself - a few days to sort things out. No pressure. When he did stop by again, it was a few minutes after closing time, and there was only one other person at the café, waiting for her drink. He watched from the outside as Finns operated the machine with delicacy and skill, almost as though he were petting a cat, smiling as always at the client as he handed her a cup and waved goodbye, that strong scent of coffee filling Stevie's nostrils as the woman swung the door open. Staying away from that coffee had been just as hard as staying away from Finns._ _

__When the little bell above the door rang, Finns had his back turned to the entrance. "Sorry, we're closing now," he announced._ _

__"That's a shame," Stevie said and waited as Finns slowly swirled around on his heels, rubbing his hands on the front of his apron. "Hey," Stevie tried, waving at him, still unsure whether to approach the counter or not._ _

__Finns gave him an awkward little grin, pressing his lips tightly together. "Hi."_ _

__There was a pause, and then, "Look, if you want me to go..." he started, but didn't finish._ _

__Finns studied him for a moment and Stevie almost expected him to say that yes, he'd prefer if Stevie didn't come by anymore, and the idea scared him for a second, more than he ever thought it would. Finns wasn't Xabi, but he had somehow gotten under Stevie's skin and when something like that happens to someone like him, it's ten times worse than when it happens to normal people, because it doesn’t just run out. Stevie's skin was thick. It wasn't easy getting under it. He just knew he wouldn't be able to get Finns out of his head for a while, maybe longer than that, and it just... It freaked him out a little, in all honesty. It was enough to be miserable because of one guy. Two was a little too much._ _

__But then when Finns finally spoke what he said was, "I'm sorry. You don't have to go just because I - I know what I did was pretty stupid. I misread the signs and got it all wrong. It's my fault. And this is not my shop anyway, so... I couldn't tell you to go even if I wanted to. Which I don't. I mean, right now we're closing, but -"_ _

__"Finns," Stevie cut him off. "We need to talk."_ _

__And they did. After Finns finished closing up the café and after Stevie helped him take the food to the shelter and after they'd walked for about twenty minutes in silence, neither of them able to start the conversation. Stevie had no idea what to say to him - so he decided to do the only thing he could think of instead. The only thing he could think of for days. He kissed Finns. And he didn't stop kissing Finns for the next 50 years._ _

__He saw Xabi for the first time maybe a year and a half after he hooked up with Finns. Xabi looked so much younger without his beard, no hair gel, Nike sneakers instead of Italian leather, a simple backpack where Stevie had gotten used to seeing a briefcase._ _

__Stevie missed him _so much_. It was so hard not to go to him, strike up conversation, just listen to the sound of his voice... But Finns was standing right there, behind the counter, making coffee and smiling at the man who owned his boyfriend's heart. Stevie knew it was possible he'd see Xabi more often after that, and it was bound to become harder and harder to resist going to him - it was like every single cell in Stevie's body was pulled towards Xabi. He was the sun and Stevie was this tiny little planet that couldn't help but gravitate around him and bathe in the warmth of his light._ _

__He knew, in that moment, that he had a decision to make._ _

__He looked at Finns, this amazing person with whom he was having a wonderful time, and then he looked at the man he'd loved for more than two hundred years now. And Stevie decided to let Xabi go. At least once. Maybe that would save him - maybe Xabi would live a happy and long life without him. Not that that made it any easier for him; it was a noble thought, but he used it as a selfish belief merely to placate the turmoil in his chest._ _

__It got easier, after a while. Mainly because Finns was the sort of person with whom it was worth it spending a lifetime with._ _

__Stevie never said a word to Xabi Alonso in his seventh lifetime, only watched him from afar when he came into the shop, ordered coffee, exchanged a few words with Finns, and then left. He wasn’t always alone, much to Stevie’s chagrin. Sometimes he’d come in with tall, tanned and handsome guy in tow. Stevie wondered if maybe that was the person Xabi was meant to end up with, why he kept on dying over and over again. He wondered if he had been disrupting Xabi's timelime by keeping him away from Tall and Handsome._ _

__In spite of all these unanswered questions that kept on gnawing at him every now and again, Stevie lived a happy life with Finns. He quit the café after another five years and they opened a business together. Finns' reputation made sure that they had a good clientele and so they made enough money to live a comfortable life, although with no luxuries. They also adopted two dogs, Brown and Bean and, when they died, Stevie understood that he could never, ever have a child. He could barely take the death of a dog, imagine trying to cope with a son or daughter who'd only last for one lifetime? He'd probably never get a dog again either._ _

__Finns died at the age of 73. Stevie woke up one morning to the sound of Finns' ragged breath next to him and found his partner sitting in bed with his back against the headboard, eyes shut tightly as though he were in pain. He said his chest was hurting a little and Stevie grabbed the phone to call an ambulance, but Finns asked for a glass of water. It couldn't have taken more than a minute for Stevie to rush to the kitchen and return, but when he did, Finns was no longer there._ _

__Stevie held his body, caressing his snow-flake white hair as he waited for the ambulance to arrive. It was sad to see him go, but there was no sorrow, no regrets whatsoever. Came his next life, Finns would be young and beautiful and smiling like sunshine at the café again, so this wasn't really the end. They had a good life, and that was all that mattered. To this day, Stevie has nothing but good memories from his seventh life. Finns was a good friend and a good companion. Taught him an infinite number of things, of which how to appreciate a good cup of coffee was the least important one. He also knew he'd let Finns follow a different path the next time - maybe with Harry, maybe with someone else entirely. But still, Stevie would always have a special place for him in his heart and in his infinite treasure of memories._ _

__Stevie died his usual death after several surgeries and a heart failure, but he made it a little bit further that time. The disease couldn't take him until he was 83, twelve years after Finns' passing._ _

__Seventh life done, then it was time to go back to Xabi._ _

__x-x-x-x_ _

__In his eighth life, Stevie did a better job at locating Xabi._ _

__He was waiting at the Buddha Café at the exact day and the exact time he remembered seeing Xabi there for the first time in his previous life. When Xabi walked out, Stevie followed him back to an apartment building four blocks away. Then he rented a flat on the same building._ _

__Stevie had a plan all mapped out - how to approach Xabi, how to kickstart a friendly neighboring relationship and then quickly moving on to an actual friendship until eventually Xabi would, as he always did before, fall in love with him. It shouldn't have been too hard, considering they got pulled to one another so fast each time they met on the train. Except Stevie had no idea Xabi was living with someone else at that time. The tall, handsome man with the tanned skin he saw at the café, all those billions of years ago._ _

__His name was Sergio._ _

__Stevie frankly didn't know what to do. He knew absolutely nothing about Sergio, except that Xabi wasn't with him, or wouldn't be with him anymore, by the 21st of April of 2015, which was almost three years away. Xabi never mentioned living with another boyfriend, certainly never mentioned a _Sergio_. Stevie has a pretty good memory; he'd remember. That could only mean one of two things: either Sergio was too insignificant, which Stevie doubted to a certain extent, because nobody you come to live with can become so meaningless to the point of not being worthy of a single mention (not to normal people, anyway), or, and that was the most likely option, Sergio was too important, and it hurt Xabi to even talk about him._ _

__That fact in itself was enough to annoy Stevie. But it got worse._ _

__He tried to push his plan forward as much as he could, because he didn't even have the 2.50pm train to Liverpool option anymore. Now that they already knew each other, it would make no sense to meet on the train. It would be a completely different trip altogether. So he wasn't left with much to do other than try and get Xabi to fall in love with him in spite of his hot Spanish boyfriend. Stevie didn't want to be a jerk, but if that was his only weapon... So be it. He worked way too hard to get where he was. How many people could claim to have literally waited a lifetime to find someone?_ _

__Only things didn't run as smoothly as he'd planned. Xabi was nice enough, as he always was, but he kept a safe distance from Stevie. Not in any of their previous lives had Stevie ever felt so much like an unwelcome presence, a mere stranger to Xabi as he did in his eighth life. The train ride only ever lasted for little less than three hours and by the time it was over, they would always be talking as freely as long time acquaintances. This time, however, it didn't matter how many elevator rides, or how many hallway small-talks Stevie tried to pull, Xabi still treated him like a nobody. Just a familiar face that meant nothing and deserved no more than standard politeness._ _

__For the longest of times, Stevie's greatest sadness had been this: the tiny little moment when Xabi looked at him on the train and didn't recognize him, didn't _feel_ anything in particular while electricity jolts shot up Stevie's spine. In his eighth life, that little moment was stretching wider than ever._ _

__Stevie started going back to the Buddha Café more often, which was something he'd sworn to himself he wouldn't do. But Stevie soon found that drowning his frustrations in caffeine and the comforting company of Finns was very helpful. He made sure not to send mixed signals this time, though - there was no flirting, only innocent conversing. Stevie needed a friend to keep him from going crazy, only he had no friends, and Finns was easy. Finns didn't have to recognize him to treat him affectionately. The fact he did that to basically everyone was completely beside the point._ _

__In all his previous lives, Stevie never had to stand back and watch Xabi parading about with someone else. He had no way to know how much that would bother him. And it was insane. He felt anger and jealousy and chagrin permeating every inch of his body, all at once. Xabi actually seemed to fancy Sergio quite a lot. Stevie could see things in Xabi that he only ever saw addressed to him - the guarded, knowing smile; the sparkly eyes; the small touches that happened for no reason other than an intrinsic need to be in contact with the one next to him._ _

__It took him a year to move from _that neighbor whose face is faintly familiar_ to _Stevie from 4B_. It wasn't a friendship per se, but it was close enough, and after rounds and rounds of defeat, Stevie considered it to be a great victory. The only problem was, becoming friends with Xabi meant, by association, becoming friends with his boyfriend. In fact, it was easier getting close to Sergio than it was to Xabi. Sergio was more open and easily impressionable. It was almost as though there was an invisible wall cloaking Stevie in that life, keeping him from coming into Xabi's radar. Nothing he did seemed to matter - until, that is, Stevie decided to attack from the opposite direction. He succeeded at overcoming his resentment towards the man who was currently occupying his place next to the love of his life in order to approach the object of his affection. _ _

__And what he found was that Sergio was in fact a very friendly lad. He and Stevie started trading small favors, gossiping about other neighbors, inviting one another for birthday celebrations. And that was how Xabi became his friend - because Sergio's friends were his friends as well._ _

__There's an irony in there somewhere to be talked about. Stevie tried not to think too much. The fact he was acting like a desperate stalker was enough to dent his dignity, thank you very much._ _

__Stevie would sometimes pretend he needed an opinion on something or _can I borrow a cup of sugar, please?_ whenever he knew Sergio wouldn't be home, just so he could get some alone time with Xabi and do a bit of flirting to see where that would take him. But Xabi was all polite deference and, if he ever understood what Stevie was doing, he acted like he didn't. _ _

__As the time passed, Stevie grew more and more impatient, became grumpy and short-tempered and recluse. He'd go on for days without setting foot outside his flat, just so he wouldn't have the displeasure of seeing Sergio's hand casually placed on the small of Xabi's back as though he had any right to do that. He moved his sulking hours from the café to the nearby pub, because he couldn't deal with the anxiety, couldn't handle not having the only thing he'd prepared himself for in his entire eighth life. He could already feel the aggravation building up inside of him as it always happened before Xabi's known deaths, that overwhelming sense of inevitability, making it hard for him to breathe, sending him this close from spinning out of control - the anxiety disease he carried with him since his second life._ _

__When the 21st of April of 2015 finally came and went and still Xabi wasn't his, Stevie knew there was something definitely wrong. Could it be that he had altered the events of Xabi's life by moving into the building? That his proximity had stopped whatever it was that was meant to happen to break he and Sergio apart? Stevie asked himself those questions a billion times over lonely pints, retraced all his steps to try and figure out where he'd gotten it all wrong. Nothing made sense._ _

__One day, after he had a bit too much to drink, Stevie marched to Xabi and Sergio's door and spanked it until someone showed up. He didn't give a flying shit that it was the wee hours of the night and that he was likely making a fool of himself; Stevie needed _answers_ and it seemed to him like the only person who could provide him with those was Xabi himself._ _

__Luckily, it was him at the door._ _

__"Steven?" he said, in only his pajama pants - pants Stevie remembered from previous lives, because they were Xabi's favorites -, scratching his sleepy eyes._ _

__"Is Sergio home?" Stevie asked in his slurred, drunken speech._ _

__Xabi stopped, gave him a good once over, tried to connect the dots of what was happening. "Yes," he said. "He's sleeping. Do you need to talk to him?"_ _

__"No," Stevie replied. "I need to talk to _you_."_ _

__"Ok," Xabi said, crossing his arms over his chest. "But you seem like you had a bit of a rough night. Don't you think it's best if we talk tomorrow?"_ _

__"I need to know _now_ Xabi! I can't wait anymore!"_ _

__Xabi frowned, confused and perhaps a little curious. "What do you need to know?"_ _

__Stevie paused for a second, his eyes burning with tears he refused to shed, his dry lips opening and closing a few times before the words finally came out, almost like a plea. " _Why_ aren't you in love with me?"_ _

__Only the smallest hint of surprise registered on Xabi's features, in the shape of slightly arched eyebrows. If he felt anything like pity, he didn't show, which, in hindsight, was probably very honorable of him._ _

__"Steven..." he started, studying his words. "I think you should go home and... Have some rest."_ _

__"No, no, you don't _understand_ ," Stevie said, shaking his head vehemently and fighting to keep his balance. "It's been one month since we were supposed to meet on the train. _One month_! That's enough time! I did everything I could, I tried _everything_... _Why_ are you still not in love with me?"_ _

__"Meet at the... what?" Xabi sighed, scratched the back of his head. "Look... I had no idea you felt that way about me. If I ever did anything to suggest that I was interested... I'm sorry, Steven. I didn't mean to lead you on. I don't think I did, but if you do, I apologize anyway."_ _

__"You haven't led me on, and that is the whole problem! Don't you _see_?!"_ _

__Xabi was getting more and more confused by the second._ _

__"I... No. I don't, actually. I have no idea what you're talking about, but... What I can tell you, regardless, is this: I love my boyfriend, Steven. I love Sergio. So... I'm sorry? I guess?"_ _

__Xabi's words slashed through Stevie like a sword, cutting him open and leaving him out to bleed. Xabi was in love with someone else. He was _right there_ and still Xabi was in love with someone else. Was that the universe trying to punish him for having given up on him for one life? Did he somehow break the spell or whatever it was that existed between him and Xabi by being with Finns? More importantly, _who_ could give him the answer to those questions? Was there even anyone out there who could?_ _

__Stevie felt as lonely as he had on that first time Xabi died, only it was worse now. Xabi wasn't being taken away from him by force; Xabi was making the active choice of being with another person. Of _loving_ another person. _ _

__"Will there ever be a life in which you won't break my heart?" he asked the other man, who stared at him with dark, questioning brown eyes, too tired to argue and too baffled to answer._ _

__Stevie turned around and walked back to the elevator. Xabi stepped outside, said "Wait", but didn't follow up with anything. Instead, he just watched as the doors slid close and took Stevie away._ _

__He moved out of the building the next morning. Partly because he could not stand to stick around any longer, and it made no sense to do so once it became clear that Xabi would not be his; partly because he was too embarrassed to face either Xabi or Sergio._ _

__Stevie considered going back to Finns for about two seconds before he realized how selfish of him it would be to do that. He had been ruined for an entire lifetime, filled with an anguish and grudge that would leave him surly for years to come. Finns deserved something better. It wouldn't be fair to use such a good person to placate the heartbreak caused by someone else._ _

__What he did was: he rented a small and quite unimpressive apartment on the other side of the city and made sure to not set foot near Xabi or Finns again. Especially the former. The latter was a mere consequence. Stevie did not want to know whether Xabi had gone on to live a happy and long life next to Sergio. He'd never be able to rest again if that had been case. What he couldn't see, couldn't hurt him (much, or at least not more than it already had)._ _

__In his eighth life Stevie met Fernando._ _

__Fernando was young, handsome, Spanish and just as angry with the world as Stevie was, which made him just perfect for the occasion. They met at a bar, because where else would two sulking rebellious men meet? Fernando was a force of nature. When he was excited about something, it was impossible not to get trapped into his bubble of euphoria and exhilaration; but when he got upset... Jesus Christ. He had a terrible temper. Became infuriated by the smallest of things more easily than Stevie could care to fix his mood, which meant they were constantly getting into fights. Fernando was one of those people who couldn't exactly find where they fit into the grand scheme of things, couldn't find a purpose, so he became frustrated, mad and dominated by a sense of injustice, as though the entire universe and their brother aligned just to foul him._ _

__Stevie was never really sure _what_ they were. They'd stay together for months and then Fernando would get annoyed at something and leave. Stevie wasn't exactly an easy person to deal with after the whole thing with Xabi, so he didn't even try to sooth Fernando when he had one of his outbursts. Stevie suspects that his might've been an actual medical issue - he suggested several times that he went to see a therapist, and every single one of his suggestions had kickstarted epic fights that would begin with Fernando laughing sardonically and saying "Right, because I'm _crazy_ " and escalate from there._ _

__Their relationship was poisonous and hurtful, but it was somehow exactly what they needed. Either that, or what they thought they deserved to have. They were on and off, on and off, on and off.. Fernando would disappear, Stevie would hook up with random people, then Fernando would show up again, totally unapologetic, sometimes with an interesting story to share, and they'd dive right back into their own personal insanity. It made no sense whatsoever, but it _worked_. And, in between arguments and offensive accusations, they had their moments as well. It was nice, when it wasn't burning._ _

__After three years of that Stevie decided to leave the country. He spent five years travelling around the world - mostly through small countries in Asia. It was quieter there, and between Xabi's disregard and Fernando's explosions, Stevie found that he needed some _rest_._ _

__When he finally got back to England, he found Fernando exactly where he left him, except apparently really hurt that he'd been abandoned._ _

__"But _you_ left me. Like you always did. You got mad and you walked away to do whatever it is that you do when you leave. I just needed a break. Even if I wanted to tell you that I was going I wouldn't know where to find you," Stevie explained._ _

__Fernando nodded his head, somehow calmer than Stevie remembered him to be, and said, "I know." And then, "I just really missed you."_ _

__They got back together after that and stayed that way for another five years. Stevie took him to Asia with him, where they lived in small tents and wooden huts and made love under the stars and were happy for a while. Actually happy. They still fought, because it was sort of inevitable, but Fernando stopped leaving, and Stevie stopped letting him._ _

__Eventually Fernando left again, because apparently that was his thing. But it wasn't after a fight, it wasn't to disappear into a storm. It was quiet and sweet, with a kiss and everything. That's how Stevie knew that he wasn't coming back this time. Stevie missed him, but he understood, in a way, why the other man had to do it. Some people are just like that - always moving, always changing, flowing with the river. Fernando was a force of nature. He came in, he tore everything apart, he put it all back together his own way, and then he left. And in the end, he helped Stevie heal. For that, he'd be forever grateful. That eighth life would've been a lot harder to navigate through if it hadn't been for him._ _

__Stevie died at the age of 69 in a motorcycle accident. Then came the ninth life, and it was time to make things right with Xabi. Two whole lives was enough time to be apart from him._ _

__x-x-x-x_ _

__In his ninth life, Stevie decided not to take chances anymore._ _

__Attempting to find a short-cut to Xabi had failed miserably. Twice. He'd learned his lesson._ _

__This time, Stevie didn't try to tinker with the course of events. He patiently waited for the 21st of April of 2015 and bought his ticket to the 2.50pm train to Liverpool. One can never go wrong with a classic._ _

__And just like magic, everything happened just _right_. Xabi was there, of course, and sat right across from Stevie, as he should, and from there on it was piece of cake. They talked, casually flirted, Xabi registered Stevie's number on his own mobile and called back at the end of the day. They met for drinks that same night and that was it. They did not leave each other's side anymore._ _

__It was all a bit like the first time, in that life. Maybe because they hadn't been together for so long, as far as Stevie was concerned anyway; maybe because he had somehow become aware of the fact that Xabi should not be taken for granted. Their love, great though it was, was not the stuff of fairy tales, as Stevie had previously thought. They could end. Xabi could meet other people and fall in love again. There had been others before._ _

__In fact, Stevie was so curious about Sergio that he started making casual questions about Xabi's past lovers, something he had never done before, not with such specificity anyway. He offered to tell a bit about his life - stirring up the details a bit to add Michael and Finns and Fernando into the mix without really saying who they were and how Stevie met them, because that would obviously get too weird to fit in just one lifetime. Besides, Xabi would probably get curious about at least Finns, who he knew from going to the Buddha Café, and, well. Too complicated. So he changed names and dates and lengths of relationships and added a bit of fiction, but was as honest as he could all things considered, hoping that Xabi would feel more confident about sharing details of his past lover._ _

__And it worked. Xabi and Sergio met when they were still in school. It was Sergio's idea that they should move to the UK - Sergio was an art student and had some great contacts at the University of London - so Stevie had him to thank for that, at least. Xabi loved him to bits, apparently, so much so that he came totally undone when he found out that Sergio had been seeing his mentor, some other Spanish lad by the name of Iker. They broke up just one year before that train ride. Even though Xabi was over all that - which he _swore _by all things holy and good in the universe - he didn't like to remember Sergio, didn't like to think of all the plans for the future that were completely destroyed by that man's unfaithfulness. "It makes me insecure," he admitted. "I'm afraid if I think about it too much I might become hesitant. I never thought things could go sour with Sergio and they did, so... You know."___ _

____Yeah, he did. He really, _really_ did._ _ _ _

____Thank God for Iker, though._ _ _ _

____But it got Stevie thinking... Was Sergio seeing this Iker guy before, in his last life, or did Stevie's influence somehow change that? Then he was just angry, but now he kind of felt bad for Xabi. He was so genuinely in love with Sergio and all that time the guy was probably cheating on him._ _ _ _

____But screw it. Screw it all, he thought. That was in a different lifetime, now Stevie had Xabi and he'd never let him go. Sergio wasn't his problem anymore._ _ _ _

____His ninth life was also the life Stevie decided to go a little more traditional. After he managed to avoid Death #1, Stevie asked Xabi to marry him. He seemed a bit surprised, shocked even, but he said yes. They tied the knots mere three months later and it was probably the happiest Stevie had ever been in all his over 500 years of existence. The only thing tempering with his constant state of contentment was the fact he knew he was running against time to save Xabi before Death #2 and #3 could come and sweep him away._ _ _ _

____And eventually, death won. Again. This time, it wasn't a car accident, or a hit-and-run, or a gunshot. It was something much more vile: a tumor. A freaking inoperable brain tumor that killed Xabi so fast there was practically nothing anyone could do. It was their longest run together, but still Xabi was dead by the age of 32 and Stevie had never been angrier about it before. Because how the _fuck_ was he supposed to beat _cancer_? He could avoid a car crash or a robbery, but he couldn't stop Xabi's body from creating a bloody tumor in his head. There were ways to try and stop it, of course; Stevie could help Xabi find out about the disease sooner, or he could try to gather knowledge from the future, become a researcher and develop the cure for that kind of tumor way before its time. But then what? If not cancer, _then what_? _ _ _ _

____It was like the universe was trying to send him a message written in cancer: _You cannot win. Stop trying._. So fucking unfair. Fighting a disease was too much. Too hard. Too complicated. And still there were no guarantees that he would be able to beat it._ _ _ _

____Ten years after Xabi's death Stevie decided if it was all he could do, then he would study as much as he could about tumors and try and develop a way to treat it in his next life, or in his next two lives, or three, or how many lives it took him to get to the cure, so that when Xabi found out about it, there would still be time to save him. And that's what he spend the last forty years of his life dedicated to: saving Xabi. That's what he would always dedicate himself to. Because there was no other choice. It was either that or giving up, and he'd be damned if he'd ever give up on Xabi Alonso. Death would not win. It would not fucking beat him._ _ _ _

____What he wasn't counting on, of course, was that he'd meet Bethany very early in his tenth life, and then everything he thought he knew, his entire world, would turn upside down._ _ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just can’t handle myself with my love for Steve Finnan, can I? I’m not even sorry.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was tempted to split this into two more parts because, once more, it grew a lot longer than I intended it to be. But here it is! Can’t believe I managed to finish something! As always, I have to apologize for all the mistakes will surely find. Please be patient about that!
> 
> Thank you very much to everyone who has read this. If you did like it or even if you have a thought or something, please let me know! Your feedback is **very** important to me. It seriously makes my day.

Bethany came to him as a slow-moving train towards a man tied to the tracks.

It was a rainy Saturday like every other Saturday had been that March and a 16 years old Steven Gerrard was walking back home after an afternoon of having his nose buried in books at the library. That's how he'd been spending most of his days: studying tumors. Stevie had done a pretty extensive job already in his previous life; all he needed now was a way to adapt his knowledge of future techniques to the present technology. Stevie was pretty sure he'd probably end up getting some Nobel prizes or something for advancing the war on aggressive brain tumors with visionary work that wasn't exactly his and that was both theft and also not the kind of spotlight reborns usually want to attract, but screw it. If that meant giving Xabi a better fighting chance, he couldn't care less about stealing other people's brilliancy. Especially if some of said people weren't even born yet.

It was a bit chilly that day and Stevie stopped to fix his hoody and hide from the drizzle when he heard someone calling his name.

"Hello, Steven," the soft, melodic female voice said.

It was Bethany.

Of course he didn't know her name yet, it was the first time he ever saw that woman, but it didn't take him more than two seconds to understand why she was standing there, smiling at him, knowing his name.

She was a reborn. A mutant like himself.

Bethany was a very beautiful woman, on her late forties, maybe already on her 50s (Stevie never asked, her age always seemed rather beside the point - it's never the actual age that counts with the lot of them). Absolutely stunning. There was a natural elegance to her that was almost supernatural, like watching one of those actresses from old Hollywood movies coming out from the screen to wander about in the real world. She moved and smiled and talked like a movie star from the 40s. Her hair was the color of wheat, he eyes were as dark as the night, but there was something warm about her, something nurturing. Bethany was a care-taker, with an aura of mystery wrapped around her like a halo. Stevie would meet her again several times after that first one, in several different lifetimes, but she never ceased to be a conundrum. She was always one step ahead of him; Bethany knew everything there was to know about Stevie, but Stevie knew almost nothing about her life.

Later on he'd realize that didn't matter at all. That wasn't the point of Bethany.

"Can we go somewhere to talk?" she asked, shifting the umbrella from one hand to the other.

Stevie simply nodded. He did that a lot on their first encounter, too split between shock and fear to produce actual words.

Bethany offered to share her umbrella and they walked in silence, side by side. Stevie wasn't paying much attention to _where_ they were going, all lost in thoughts and feelings and sensations. He couldn't decide whether to be excited or scared. There was nothing even remotely hostile about Bethany, quite the opposite; she was very affable, very calm, but still. Stevie was apprehensive. It was one thing to imagine that there were other reborns; it was a completely different one to come face to face with one of them. 

As they walked, Stevie realized that there was _something_ about Bethany. He could sort of _feel_ her presence even though they weren't touching. Like the air around her was charged with a different sort of energy that affected his molecules and made his insides twist a little bit - not in a sick sort of way, but in awareness. 

"You can feel it too, huh?" she asked, just smiling as she looked straight ahead, as though she could read his thoughts. "Don't worry, that's normal. We can all feel each other. Our bodies aren't any different from a regular person, but our spirits aren't the same. We can recognize a kindred soul, if we get close enough."

She led him towards a small café that he would've probably never even noticed if he didn't know where to look. The epitome of discreet, the outside not corresponding in one bit with the inside. The place seemed to have been frozen in time, probably somewhere in the early 1900s, like one of those _belle époque_ fancy places where the rich kids went to in movies. There were maybe five or six other people there, and they all felt _weird_ , a strange sort of electricity in the air connecting them together - and to Stevie - in a manner he'd never felt before.

They were all reborns. It was a reborn café. _Shit_.

"Please, don't be scared. I know you're probably very confused right now, but it will all make sense in a second. I mean no harm, I swear," she said. "Harming one of our own is the worst offense possible to our kind. I'd never dream of it."

_Our kind_. It was so strange to hear that. It was so strange to be _surrounded_ by other immortal souls. He'd always suspected that he wasn't the only one because it was just too much, too impossible, for it to have happened just once. It would imply that he was in some way special, meant for greater things or some comic book bullshit like that. Which was not at all like he felt. So there _had_ to be others. Stevie just never thought he'd actually meet them.

That was... Overwhelming, to say the least.

"I've never..." Stevie started, choked on his own words, then started again. "I've never met another person like me before."

"Well, there's a first time for everything, right? Even for us. I'm Bethany," she said, offering her well-manicured and delicate hand, which Stevie shook after a moment too long of hesitation. For a second there he was afraid there would be sparkles or a jolt when they touched. He could _feel_ her even from a distance, after all. But there was no instantaneous combustion or electric discharge. It was a bit anti-climactic, even; all very ordinary. "How old are you?"

"I'm 16."

Bethany laughed. "No. I mean how many lives?"

"Oh," Stevie said. "Uhm. This is my tenth."

"Ten? You're still only a child."

Stevie frowned. "How old are _you_?"

Bethany smiled shortly, making a sign with her hands to the man behind the counter, who responded with a courteous nod. "I'm 76."

"Wow," Stevie said, genuinely impressed. That woman had lived for _millenniums_.

"It's not very polite to answer like that when a lady tells you her age, but I will forgive you, considering this is your first encounter with someone else like yourself," she said, playfully. Stevie still blushed. 

The man to whom Bethany had signaled interrupted them with a tray full of delicious looking pastries and tea. Stevie's stomach grumbled as the wonderful smell of the food filled his nostrils. His head had been so messed up by Bethany's arrival that he completely forgot it was past tea time. He was _starving_.

"Thank you, Emmanuel. These look terrific, as always."

"It's my pleasure, ma'am."

With another nod, Emmanuel left, and Bethany immediately started pouring tea for the two of them.

"Milk?" she asked. Stevie nodded, and felt his head spinning a little bit at the simplicity of the scene. A millenniums old woman pouring him tea like it's nothing. Just another day in her life.

"You're probably wondering how I found you," she continued after sipping from her cup. Stevie didn't say anything. He felt like there was no need for him to talk at all for conversation to ensue with Bethany. Maybe living for millenniums teaches you how to read people's minds. "I'm a frequent passenger of the 2.50pm train to Liverpool on the 21st of April of 2015 myself."

Stevie gaped at that. "You... what?"

"Oh, don't try to picture me at the train, you'll probably fail," she added quickly with a smile, again reading his thoughts. "I can pale to insubstantiality if I want to, and I usually want to. I imagine at this point you've probably already realized that there are certain dangers inherent to our existence. If people knew what we know... It's best that they don't notice us, if possible. Unless we want them to, of course. Which is not the case with the train. But I know every single face of every single person who rides that train with me. I've done it enough times to have them memorized. I don't _always_ go to Liverpool on that day, mind you. Only every few lifetimes or so. But I've been there enough to notice you, Steven."

She sipped again from her tea, then bit on a small biscuit before continuing.

"I noticed your presence, of course, but not so strongly. We're never sitting very close from one another. And we do get it wrong sometimes, which I thought was the case with you because every single time we rode that train together, everything always happened exactly the same way. That was a very good indication that you were _not_ one of ours. We don't tend to repeat ourselves that much. But then..." she made a pause and smiled triumphantly. "Then you weren't there. Just like that. One day, you didn't show up. And that's when I knew... I'd found another one. I went back there in my past life, and there you were again. I followed you around a little bit, did a little digging. Confirming my suspicions was easy-peasy - you need to be more careful, by the way. Child genius studying inoperable cancers at the age of 16? That raises flags."

Stevie always perceived himself as a discreet person, but clearly he wasn't as subtle as he thought he was. Definitely not even close to Bethany on that regard.

"Why did you have to find me?" he asked. "You could've just talked to me on the train."

Bethany took a deep breath then, her eyes flickering away from him for a second. Maybe Stevie didn't have her skills reading people, but he knew enough to sense reluctance when he saw it. Even before she said something, he knew that what she had to share wasn't necessarily good news.

"That young man you're always talking to on the train, the one who's always late. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he's the reason why you keep going back to that train time and time again, is he not?"

"... yes," Stevie agreed after a moment. 

"I figured," Bethany nodded, tapping her fingers on the table. "He means a lot to you, doesn't he?" Stevie swallowed down hard before nodding timidly. "Oh, my child..." Bethany shook her head lightly, her eyes full of some sort of sad sympathy that made Stevie's insides twirl. "I'm afraid I'm here to tell you that you shouldn't see him anymore."

Stevie's heart jumped to his throat and he nearly dropped his cup. "Why not? What are you talking about?"

"You shouldn't see him because he's your anchor."

"My... what?"

"Anchor," Bethany repeated. "Did you never find it strange how suddenly close to him you felt? How extraordinarily fast the two of you got along? For us, it's not very easy to allow people in, is it? Well, it's never easy for me, and not for anyone else I've met. That's not to say we don't have friends and lovers who become very dear to us, but it's different, isn't it? We don't always go back to the same people over and over again. We might get to go back to our favorites now and then, but not _all the time_. It's not in our nature to get attached so easily. But you _did_ get attached to that young man, didn't you?"

"He's... We're... I _love_ him," Stevie gritted out, almost aggressively.

"Oh, I know you do. That's how we interpret that feeling, what the anchors make us feel like. _Love_. It is love, after all. A dependable, all-consuming and completely overwhelming love, unlike anything else we've ever experienced." Bethany stopped for a spell, looked right into Stevie's eyes. "But he keeps dying, doesn't he?"

"How do you -"

" _Anchors_ ," Bethany cut him off. "That's what they do. They never last too long. Here's the short story. We don't know what created us, how we came into being, what makes individuals like ourselves possible. If it's magical, extraterrestrial, physical... No one knows. There are some good guesses, but no certainty whatsoever. And the same thing goes for the anchors. We can't explain them. All we know is that for each one of us there seem to be a person that serves as an anchor. We call them that because they keep us tied to this one same event, over and over again. We just want to go back to them, whichever way we can, and that invariably leads us back to one same day and one same time and somewhat guarantees that we are going to follow coordinated steps, the same as every other human being. Whatever got us here - whichever cosmic force is responsible for bringing us back to the starting point after our deaths, it tries to correct this anomaly by forcing us to follow one same path as though we were normal. And they do it through the anchors. That's how they get us back on track."

Stevie could feel all the color draining from his face, feel the bottom drop out of his stomach. Xabi, his Xabi, his perfect, beautiful Xabi, just another pawn on this stupid game the universe was playing with him.

"No.." he murmured after a moment. "It can't be. Xabi... He _loves_ me. _We_ love each other."

"I'm not saying you don't, darling. The feelings you have for your anchor are all very real. Trust me. I know." She said with such sorrow, her eyes becoming so full of remorse that Stevie couldn't help but feel sympathetic towards her pain. She was either a very good liar or telling the truth. "But that doesn't change the fact that he's there for a reason, and that reason is to keep you trapped on a never-ending loop of grief and loss and sadness. Because they never live long enough, doesn't matter how hard you try to save them. That's the catch. We love them too much, we lose them too soon, so we go back and we try again. And again, and again, and again. It's a very sadistic game that we cannot escape. Not unless we let them go."

"But... I tried to find him sooner, before the train ride, and he was with someone else. He didn't fall for me then. If he's my anchor, then how come he didn't fall for me?"

"That's because you broke the spell. When you change the course of events, you break the magic that bonds you. There's no way to guarantee it'll go the same way anymore, the principle is the same as with the theory of chaos. Once you change something, you cannot predict what the modifications will create further down the path. It might happen the same way or it might not. In your case, it didn't. Let's just say you freed him from his anchor duties."

"So what? What if I don't mind being trapped? I don't care. I just want to be with him."

"Steven..." Bethany said, taking one of his hands between her own and caressing it softly. "I know it's hard. And I know it might take a while for you to digest the idea. It's why I wanted to see you years before that train ride finally came, so that you would have enough time to think about it. There's a whole world of things you don't know yet about being who you are. Maybe in the beginning you won't understand. By God, it took me a decade to let go of my anchor after I learned what he was, and I still think about him, one way or another, every single day. But the thing is... You will only start living a full life that is entirely your own once you learn to let go. The world is so big, Steven. You can see it all, you can _have_ it all on the palm of your hands... You have _time_ , which is the most precious treasure in the universe. You can learn other languages, visit exotic islands, meet new people - _fall in love_... And believe me when I say it will happen. Leaving the anchor is not the end of everything. And more importantly... If you really care about him, you will let him go. If you stop going to him, it'll break the spell and allow him to live his life, not being an anchor. He'll _live_ , Steven. Long and happy years. That's the only way they get to live. Away from us. We are what kills them. That's the hurtful truth we all have to accept at some point."

What Stevie remembers best from this moment is the cold, raw hurt that spread through his chest. All those years working hard to become a neuro-genius, all those lifetimes moving heaven and earth to try and save Xabi from the next tragedy that would fall upon him... And it was his fault all along. He was the car crash that smashed Xabi's head, he was the drunk driver that hit him and left him for dead, he was the mugger who shot him cold in the chest, he was the tumor growing in his brain. 

Stevie was the disease that ended Xabi's life. His love was poisonous. 

He left that café with Bethany's phone number - which she guaranteed remained the same in every life - and a question ringing loud in his head: what the hell was he supposed to do? Stop his entire plan for that life and just... quit? Not go after Xabi anymore? Find something else to occupy his time with?

His mind wasn't clear. It raced and throbbed like the worst kind of fever, and in fact it was so much like coming down with something that Stevie didn't leave home for a week, just hid under the covers, not wanting to see the light of day. His mother thought it was a flu - "There is this virus going around," she said. "Oh, Steven, I _told you_ not to go out with just that hoody, didn't I?". He didn't mind much. Well, in all honesty, he wasn't paying any attention to anything she was saying. He was unaware of even thinking. 

The good news was, there were four years between then and the next 2.50pm train to Liverpool. That would Stevie some time to consider, perhaps even come to terms with this new reality: that he wasn't alone in the world, that there were hundreds maybe thousands of reborns out there, joined together in this little club full of rules and regulations - "I will tell you all about it when you're ready," Bethany said, "but right now I think you have more immediate matters to appreciate" - and that Xabi was just another weirdness in a long list of weirdnesses in his life, one that he was supposed to walk away from. An _anchor_.

Stevie thought a lot about what Bethany said, about how he could meet other people and fall in love again and do different things with his life if only he didn't get pulled back by that Liverpool-bound train every time like a black hole sucking him into trudging one same line. He thought about Finns and the only time when he'd actively made the choice of not pursuing Xabi. He'd lived a happy life then, and he'd loved Finns with as much heart as it was possible to. Stevie never regretted the time they spent together. So Bethany wasn't all wrong; it _was_ possible to love other people wholeheartedly, even if, deep down, he still missed Xabi. 

The thing is that Stevie had a choice then - he _decided_ against being with Xabi _because_ he knew he could always do it again the next time. Now it was no longer a matter of free will, but rather an imposition. That made it all different.

The question of whether or not to leave Xabi for good set on the base of his spine like a parasite for four years, gnawing on the nerves there. And when the time finally came, Stevie bought the ticket and boarded the train. 

Twenty seconds before Xabi got in, he changed seats, moved to an empty space across the corridor, and watched as that same old scene unfolded before his eyes: Xabi, wet and bothered, jumping onto the train, late as always, taking his spot, trying to work on his phone... 

It was the hardest thing Stevie ever had to do, but he faced away from the man he loved and stayed like that for the rest of the trip. 

_"Live, Xabi. I want you to live."_

He watched as Xabi walked away at the platform, completely unaware of his existence, and as soon as he'd disappeared, Stevie bought a ticket back to London and went home.

His love had been a curse to Xabi for way too long. Now, he'd turned it into a gift. Even if part of his heart would be forever with Xabi, even if Stevie could never find love quite like that again, even if his soul literally _ached_ for Xabi and every cell in his body itched to touch him. 

In the end, Stevie would not be able to live with himself knowing how vicious and toxic his mere proximity was to the object of his utmost affection. That hurt almost as much as leaving him - almost as much as losing him.

That's how much he loved Xabi. Enough to let him go.

x-x-x

And that, of course, was a lot easier said than done.

Stevie swore by everything holy and pure that he wouldn't be going back to that train again. It didn't seem like a hard decision at all, when he looked at the situation objectively, rather than through the blurry lenses of his hurt feelings: with him, Xabi would die; without, Xabi would live. It was simple. 

That was, however, not to say he was willing to let go without a fight.

The fact Bethany seemed to be telling the truth didn't meant Stevie wouldn't conduct his own investigation into the matter. He had to see with his own eyes that her words were real, that Xabi would survive the grim reaper that followed him like a shadow whenever they got together - that he was _happy_ and fulfilled without any Steven Gerrards crashing into his life uninvited. Honest though Bethany might have been, her words weren't enough to settle the doubt in Stevie's head. He couldn't think of a single reason why a complete stranger would lie to him about something that did not concern or affect her at all, but it was still part of his instincts not to trust anyone, not even another reborn. If there was even a small chance that Bethany was mistaken or if there was a way of breaking the spell without getting Xabi killed... Well. He was all game.

So what Stevie did was: he tracked down Xabi a few times along the way in his tenth life. Something he'd feared doing before exactly because he was too scared of finding out whether Xabi could have peace as long as he wasn't around. Now that had become his only option. It wasn't easy, but it was all there was left. 

He found Xabi three times. The first happened two years after the train ride, and Xabi was apparently well and healthy and still working at the museum. So he'd managed to escape at least two deaths already, without the need of external intervention. But that wasn't what worried Stevie the most. Those early deaths were all very circumstantial: Xabi was at the wrong place, at the wrong time. It was only too simple to avoid it by simply _not_ being there, and if he wasn't with Stevie, then he was somewhere else, doing something else entirely, and it was completely plausible that a smooth change in directions would lead Xabi away from these encounters with death. What really worried Stevie was the brain tumor. _That_ was what would provide an irrefutable answer to the veracity in Bethany's tale.

Stevie postponed that moment for as long as he could, but eventually he figured it was futile to pretend he wouldn't have to find out sooner or later. Roughly ten years after the 2.50pm train he never got, Stevie started his search feeling torn between how desperately he didn't want to find Xabi and how much of a monster that sentiment made him. Finding Xabi meant that it was all true. They never got to spent ten years together, Xabi was always dying before that. So you can imagine how disappointing it was when it took him no more than a second to locate Xabier Alonso.

Thousands of Google mentions, hundreds of photographs and dozens of interviews. Xabi was as handsome as he'd ever been, ginger beard and everything, and one of the most respected figures amongst European's modern art circles. Managing director of the Tate Modern. In his mid-thirties, past the tumor phase, alive and well and beautiful.

It was... Heartbreaking.

Because it was apparently stronger than him, Stevie started donating ridiculous amounts of money to the museum and its charities, but never under his real name. Not that it would matter, anyway; this Xabi Alonso had no idea who Steven Gerrard was, and he knew for a fact that finding Xabi later on in life didn't exactly matter. By then, he'd already broken the spell and was no longer bound to serve as an anchor to an immortal soul. It's not like reading Stevie's name or seeing his face would spark a memory back into life in Xabi's head (regardless of how many _please please please please_ Stevie chanted under his breath). Those memories were simply _not there_. They'd never existed in the first place.

In fact, Stevie wondered if maybe the whole anchor thing wasn't other way around - Xabi could get away from him and never miss a thing, while he had to stumble through life with a frown on his face and a hole in his chest, forever hung onto the other man, even if not physically. _He_ was the anchor, not Xabi. It certainly felt as though he were sinking to the bottle of something more often than not.

All that money invested turned _Mr. George Thorn_ into one of the most important names on every single list of guests to every single important event at the Tate. For six years Stevie refused every single invitation, until one random day he woke up a bit of an attitude and decided to go _'fuck it, why not?'_. And then he wished he hadn't. It should've been enough to know that Xabi was alive, that was all the answer he needed, but apparently Steven Gerrard is a little bit masochist and had to go and torture himself further. Like things weren't bad enough the way they were.

What he got from the experience was a wrenched heart and a feeling that he would never heal again. It was painful - actually physically painful - to see Xabi parading across the halls, shaking hands and offering smiles and being absolutely _perfect_ , except for the fact that he was not Stevie's. Every single memory of every single life spent alongside the Spaniard emerged from the depths of Stevie's mind in the space of a second. Memories of lives he could never live again, because Bethany was right after all. It was all true.

"Mr. Thorn," Xabi said to him, that goddamn beautiful smile turning his lips upwards just enough to brighten up his features. The sort of smile that showed enthusiasm but professionalism, the type that Xabi used to save for _other_ people.

Stevie forced himself to smile back as he counted all the new crinkles on the corners of his beloved's eyes, the signs of an age he never got to see before. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I was starting to think I'd never have a chance to shake the hands of the man who makes my work so much easier. You're a blessing to all modern art lovers, sir, I hope you know this."

_Bang. Bang. Bang._ Every word uttered in that Spanish accent felt like a shot straight to Stevie's heart.

"I'm not a fan of the spotlight," he said, not quite sure he was being successful in hiding his disheartenment. "My donations are made entirely out of love, Mr. Alonso. Nothing more."

"Oh, I believe that. A man who contributes so much with the museum and our charities obviously love his art very much. It's a very noble sentiment."

"Yes," Stevie agreed. "I do love my art." If Xabi noticed how he choked on the last word a little bit, he never mentioned.

They spoke for a while - about the museum, the current exhibitions, the future exhibitions, the pieces they were desperately trying to acquire... The Spaniard talked like he wanted to impress - _"See, we're taking very good care of your money, I'm very professional, you can trust me, please don't ever stop sending the checks"_. Stevie wanted to interrupt him and say there was no need to waste his saliva trying to convince him to keep the investments because he would never stop helping Xabi out, even if that consisted in cheating the rules a little bit. He didn't stop the other man, though, just let him keep talking and talking and talking... It was mesmerizing. The way he smiled, the sound of his voice, how the accent became thicker when he laughed or got too excited, the glint in his eyes... Stevie could sit there just listening and watching him the whole night and never get tired, never even blink. 

After a few Champaign flutes, Xabi decided to ask about him. "What is it that you do exactly, Mr. Thorn, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Please, call me George," he corrected, softly. "I'm an investor," Stevie said. "I make money from putting money in the right places, at the right time. And then I take the money I make and I send it to causes that matter." 

"And what about Mrs. Thorn? Is she here tonight?"

Stevie stopped, looked him dead in the eye and felt... Weird. In a certain way, he was staring right at the only Mrs. Gerrard that had ever existed, Michael aside (at this point, Stevie doesn't even consider Michael anymore, to be honest). And then it occurred to Stevie that that question was the most clichéd way of finding out whether someone you're interested on is already taken. Was Xabi... _flirting_ with him? Was that what the question was all about, feeling the ground before advancing? 

"There is no Mrs. Thorn," Stevie said as his heart started beating up faster. What would he do if Xabi actually made a move on him? Wasn't that against everything Bethany said? Shouldn't he have broken the spell already and not be attracted to Stevie in any ways? God knows he tried making that happen before and it did not work. Could it be...?

"Hey!" someone interrupted them, heads turning towards the voice immediately. It belonged to a tall, handsome man, probably on his late thirties or early forties, gracefully dressed in a neat and classic dark grey suit. It looked almost aristocratic on him. He approached them with a smile that lasted for about two seconds in Stevie's direction before he focused all his attention on Xabi - and then the smile grew into a beam and his green eyes sparkled and Stevie knew, he just _knew_ , that he wouldn't like that man, whoever he was. "I've been looking for you all over the place," he spoke in his perfect, private school RP accent. 

"I'm sorry. I was having such a lovely conversation here, I forgot to go back," Xabi said, sending Stevie a quick glance as he spoke. He sat a little straighter and seemed immediately less flirtatious than he had a minute before. "This is Mr. George Thorn," he added, gesticulating towards Stevie.

"Oh," the man interjected, eyebrows shooting up in genuine surprise. "You mean _the_ famous George Thorn?" 

"Famous?" Stevie asked.

"Oh, yes. Very famous indeed! Xabi never stops talking about you to basically everyone. George Thorn, the museum's most important donor. He's had a crush on you even before he met you, Mr. Thorn," the man said, chuckling and placing an intimate hand on Xabi's shoulder.

"Frank," the Spaniard admonished. "You're being inappropriate."

"I'm sorry," _Frank_ said, removing his hand. "I'm sorry, Mr. Thorn," he repeated fixing his green eyes on him. "I meant no offense."

"None taken," Stevie offered, almost through greeted teeth.

There was a short moment of awkward silence before Xabi started talking again. "This is Frank Lampard, he's one of the museum's lawyers," he explained. And then, after Stevie and Frank shook hands, he added, eyes suddenly moving away from Stevie, "And also my partner."

"Your... Partner?" Stevie asked, suddenly very serious. "As in... Romantic partner?"

Xabi exchanged an embarrassed look with Frank and Stevie instantly understood what it meant - the way he sounded, the way his face contorted into a grimace... Xabi obviously thought he had something against gay men. 

If only he knew the real reason behind Stevie's lack of enthusiasm...

"Well, Xabi here isn't very keen on romance, but I suppose that's what you'd call." It was Frank who said it, a tiny grin dancing on his lips.

"Oh," Stevie said after a moment. "Right. Yes. Of course."

"Or you could just call us husbands," Frank added.

And that was just...

Stevie's heart dropped and landed somewhere between his feet, shattering into a million little pieces.

So that was the person Xabi was intended to end up with. Frank Lampard. Posh and handsome and funny. _Funny_. Stevie hated people with a good sense of humor because in fact he loved a good sense of humor and he didn't hate funny people at all, only Frank Lampard. He seemed... Perfect. Exactly like someone Xabi should end up with, if he only weren't meant to be Stevie's. Frank Lampard was the person Xabi's de-anchored heart rushed to. Not Sergio Ramos, who was a cheater and not at all refined, with his dyed hair cut in a weird fashion and all those tattoos and tanned skin. Hot like a Latin lover you'd like to watch in a porn movie, but not someone you'd want to marry. Not like _Frank Lampard_ , who was irritatingly elegant and polite and fit the perfect description of People Anyone Would Want To Introduce To Their Parents.

Stevie hated him with all his heart.

"You're... married?" he asked, eyes darting down to Xabi's hands. 

"I don't wear a ring," he said, noticing what Stevie was doing. "Not yet, anyway. We've been married for two months and my ring kept falling off my finger. I was afraid I'd lose it, so I took it off. Need to have it adjusted but can never find the time."

"Ah," was all the sound Stevie could produce. 

Frank had a ring around his finger. Beautiful and golden and not very different from the one Stevie slipped onto Xabi's finger last life. He could still remember it as though it had been yesterday.

"Congratulations, then," he added a second too late for it to sound genuine.

Xabi told Frank he'd be right out and tried to make Stevie comfortable again by talking about work. No more flirting, no more asking personal questions, no more pretending to be tipsy. Stevie might have seemed like a homophobe to him but he was still the museum's most important donor and Xabi was nothing but courteous towards him. But there was nothing to salvage there. Damage had already been done. As soon as it was possible, Stevie got out of there. Running.

It was hard to tell what hurt the most: confirming that Bethany was right about the anchor curse, finding out that Xabi was married to someone else or realizing that he'd been flirting with Stevie to try and get more support for the museum. He felt used and manipulated by his own love. That was just disgraceful. 

After that disaster, it was natural that Stevie wouldn't try to find Xabi again for a long very time. He never stopped donating to the museum, but politely declined each and every invitation received afterwards, some of which were personally sent by Xabi. He got an email right after that unfortunate conversation apologizing for Frank's ill-timed jokes and hoping that he hadn't made _Mr. Thorn_ too uncomfortable by sharing private matter of his personal life. Stevie never even replied to that. What would he say? _'The only thing that made me uncomfortable was the thought of Frank dearest's tongue in your mouth instead of mine.'_

For the next thirty years, Stevie split his time between wallowing in self-pity or dedicating his days to traveling and hobbies and temporary lovers that never seemed to fill the hole left by that one terrible night at the museum. And then he finally went back to London. A quick search revealed Xabi Alonso, now in his 60s, had been promoted to CEO of the Tate Modern. He was still alive and well, apparently, but Frank had passed away a couple of years before. 

Stevie was almost sorry for Xabi. He knew exactly what it felt like to have someone you love being taken away from you.

They never saw each other again though, and Stevie never even tried to find him after that. He died at the age of 75. Xabi might have even out-lived him.

 

x-x-x

Stevie spent 1026 years, or 14 lives, completely away from Xabi.

That's a hell of a lot of time to fill, if you ask him. The beginning was hard. After so much time dedicating the first few decades of his life to waiting for Xabi, it was difficult to assimilate the fact that those were not waste years anymore. There was nothing waiting for him on the 21st of April of 2015. He could start to live well before his 25th birthday. But _how_? It was hard to even figure out where to begin.

The problem is, when you have 1026 years to spend, you kind of have to learn how to get creative, otherwise basically everything starts getting old pretty soon. And, in his case specifically, the temptation to crawl back to Xabi was way too big, at times almost as though there was a magnetic force pulling him towards that train. It was an arduous and exhausting fight against something that had built into a basic instinct over the years, but, slowly, it got easier. Stevie became used to the concept of having Xabi only as an idea, a hypothesis that wasn't really tangible. It made Xabi feel less like a human being, who was alive and breathing and walking around somewhere within arm's reach, and more like a dream Stevie had a long time ago. 

Bethany kept showing up at random moments, in random places. She never called to say when she was coming, never bid farewell before going. Stevie was never really sure when he'd see her, but somehow she seemed to know exactly when he'd be in need of her the most. Whenever Stevie started thinking too much about Bethany, there she was. 

She taught him all about _The Club_ \- a very presumptions name, in Stevie's opinion, but who is he to judge? The Club has existed for longer than anyone knows. No one can tell exactly when or who started it, only that no matter how far back in time you go, it's always there. That's another cool thing Bethany taught him, actually: sending messages back and forward in time through other reborns. It takes a while for things to get answered, but eventually they do. There are tons of ways reborns can get their messages across, but the most commonly used is through their chain of fellow mutants. All you need to do is find someone who's either much older, which means they'll have started their lives long before you, so the message can travel further back faster, or someone much younger, who'll live way beyond your years. Reborns have been doing that sort of thing for ages. 

The Club was also wonderful if you meant to travel the world. They held meetings absolutely _everywhere_ and offered all sort of assistance to its very exclusive members. Stevie had no idea there were so many of them, spread across the entire globe. To reborns, it doesn't matter if they never saw you before, they consider you a friend merely because you share that one personality trait with them - which, well, it is kind of an important trait. 

Travelling was Stevie's weapon of choice to get away from his _anchor_. God, he hated to think of Xabi as an _anchor_. It had such an awful ring to it, like what they felt for each other wasn't real or as though Xabi was a terrible thing to happen to him. Stevie ignored both possibilities. He accepted that he had to let the man of his life go because that was the only way he would live, but that didn't mean he would ever settle for the idea that what they had was not _real_. If that wasn't real, then frankly nothing else in his life was, either before or after. Xabi remains the most vivid and passionate memory he carries with him, and that, to someone who's lived over two thousand years, is saying a lot.

Stevie went _everywhere_. He started with the beaches and the islands and the exotic forests. Then he moved on to the mountains. Then the deserts. Then the big cities again, because you kind of start missing the comfort of piped water, microwaves and heaters after a while. He worked as a diving instructor, as a ship captain, as a wild life preservationist. He learned how to cook and even collected a few Michelin stars as a renowned chef one time. He decided to make his old first life childhood dreams come true simply because he could if he really wanted to (how many people can say that?) and won a Champions League as Liverpool captain and went to Mars on the first manned mission to the red planet. It was a fiasco, by the way, the entire crew died on the landing. Stevie was only 37 at the time and felt really frustrated once he was old enough in his next life to remember what happened, but he figured he died as somewhat of a hero and probably had memorials built in his honor and all that. Death-wise, it wasn't the most terrible way to go.

Stevie had... Well, more lovers than he can remember, really. It's a bit of a shame to admit that, but it's true. Not all of them were memorable. Some just entertaining or exceptionally good at what they did. Stevie learned certain _tricks_ that made him embarrassed both because they were too cheeky and also because a person as old as him should've probably known those things. It's amazing how you can live for thousands and thousands of years and never stop learning. There's always something new, like a twist of a tongue or a little curve with the fingers or a new toy or a natural little medicine you'd never thought about taking before. That's what Bethany was talking about when she said he had to leave Xabi and start _living_. 

So not everyone he met along the way meant something, but that doesn't mean no one did. A handful of people became very dear to him; a few Stevie would go as far as to say he actually loved. He even got married again, once. It felt wrong, for some reason, because the only people he'd ever married before were Michael, who turned out to be a mistake, and, well... Xabi. He didn't think he should marry anyone anymore after marrying Xabi because he was _it_. Definitive. In his heart, Stevie would always be married to Xabi. Which was of course ridiculous because Xabi had no idea he existed and was likely getting married to his posh lawyer boyfriend around the exact same time, but still Stevie felt like there was a cord connecting his heart to his old love. He could put it aside, pretend it wasn't there, live on, but he could not forget. Never.

It took him a few lifetimes to get over all that and decide it was time. His name was David and he owned a restaurant by the beach in Thailand. Technically, the laws did not allow them to get married in Thailand, but they had the symbolic ceremony there anyway. David had this whole philosophy about honoring vows professed in front of loved ones and under the sky, blessed by the moon and the stars. Stevie, always the skeptical resurrecting man that he was, didn't really believe in any of that spiritual stuff, but David was so passionate about it that he couldn't help but go along with it. Officially, they weren't really married, but they were in every other aspect that counts. And Stevie did love David and his free spirit, his passion for the simple things and the intensity with which he defended all that mattered to him.

In South America Stevie met a man named Luis, who had so much fire in him it was like there was a volcano exploding inside his body. You could feel the man's aura burning up around him from afar. He was a little devil, Luis was. But probably the most honest person Stevie ever met in his entire life. Luis had a sort of childish naivety about him, like he imagined the world a much better place than it really was, and went on about life getting disappointed every time the harsh, cold truth of reality was thrown back at him. It never got him down, though. He wasn't a quitter. If he was brought down a hundred times, he'd get up and start again one hundred and one. Hard-working and dedicated to the core. And when he loved something, he loved it with all his being. Luis didn't know how to give anything less than 100% to absolutely everything, and that included love. Stevie would've probably stayed around him for a lot longer, if the Uruguayan hadn't left him first. Great things burn faster, they say. They parted ways in good terms though, kept in touch until the day Luis died, just a few months before Stevie. 

In his 22nd life, Stevie felt bolder. He decided he wanted to get inked for the first time. It was never something he had particularly fancied, not on his own body anyway, but what the hell, right? He should try it at least once. And he's very glad he did it, because it led him to Daniel and Martin. They were two towering Europeans who owned a tattoo parlor in New York, where Stevie decided to land for a lifetime of cosmopolitan amusement. Besides being amazing tattoo artists, they were also incredible lovers. He lived with the pair of them for five years in a polyamory relationship that was the craziest and also the most spectacular thing ever. 

That 22nd life was quite the ride, mind you. Stevie partied like he never had before, made out with more random, drug-induced strangers than he ever had before, got both his arms completely covered in tattoos and even had Daniel and Martin's names inked to his wrists. He asked for an 'X' to be drawn on the left side of his chest, but never told them what it meant. He parted ways with the duo when they started talking about starting a family. If there was one thing that never changed, not even a little bit, in all his years of existence, it was how much Stevie abhorred the idea of having a child. It was hard enough not having all the people he loved with him anymore every time he started a new cycle; he could not fathom the pain of losing a kid.

Martin and Daniel were a little hurt, but eventually they understood. Stevie's refusal got them to delay the project for a few more months so that they could enjoy more time together. Then Stevie moved out, and they moved on. Daniel and Martin had Mateo and James while Stevie had a series of overdoses that nearly killed him. No pain, no gain, right?

In his 23rd life, Stevie decided to take things slowly again. It was like he was brought back to the world still on a hangover. He decided to stay in London, at least for a while, dedicated some time to his old mates from his first life, like Carra, ended up working as an investment consultant and donating money to the museum again, just because. A little anti-climactic after the threesomes and hard-partying of his past life, but a much welcome change in venues. He wasn't getting any younger and he could actually feel that in his bones, even though they were brand new ones. Soon enough he understood the reason.

His 23rd life was also the one where he met JT.

JT was as ordinary as a person can be. He worked as a barman, made just enough money to rent a tiny apartment and liked playing football on Sundays. He'd attempted a professional career when he was younger and was pretty decent, but a serious injury decided his fate for him when he was 14. Needless to say he was quite impressed with how good Stevie was with a football - he did win a Champions League once, after all.

They met very casually - Carra dared Stevie to ask for the barman's number in what he deemed would be a funny joke, because Stevie thought the guy looked hot but Carra was absolutely _certain_ he wasn't gay, so Stevie would obviously be very embarrassed to be hitting on a straight guy ("My anti-gay radar never fails," Carra said. "That fella is definitely not one of yours"). And as it turned out, Stevie had had just the right amount of alcohol to go ahead with that stupid idea, but guess what? The barman _was_ gay and he _did_ give Stevie a name and a phone number.

John Terry.

There was something about John that had immediately stricken a cord with Stevie, but it took him a while to identify exactly what was it about the barman that desperately caught his attention. John had a rich laughter and a personality that could expand to fill an entire room. You could easily mistake him for the life of the pub, rather than just the man serving the pints. He was modest and funny and walking next to him meant stopping to say hi to someone every five steps because that man knew absolutely _everyone_.

And then it hit Stevie that John reminded _so much_ of Finns.

The similarities were not all that obvious; you had to look between the lines to see it. Finns was quiet and amicable where JT was very _in your face_ ; Finns had a little aura of mystery that felt kind of inviting and made you want to find out what made him tick, where JT liked to wear his emotions as bright as the sun, with that air about him as though he were constantly on the verge of bursting into laughter. They were different, but similar in ways, somehow causing the same effect on Stevie. He felt comfortable around them, warm and fuzzy like homecoming. Being with JT felt familiar; it brought back coffee-scented memories of a lifetime many, many years before.

It was nothing extraordinary, but it was simple and fun and Stevie developed a strong penchant for easy things over the years. His 23rd life was bound to pass by as uneventfully and calm as he could possibly hope for, but another apparition by Bethany got his engines moving out of axis again.

He was sitting by the window at the pub, waiting for John to finish his shift, watching from afar as he moved from one side of the counter to the other, offering jokes and smiles and alcohol with the same ease, when she slid onto the spot across from him.

"Hello, darling," she said, looking slightly older than he'd become used to seeing her. Bethany normally never came looking for him when she started approaching her 60s. Never after her 70s. Stevie never asked why, but he could guess.

"This is unexpected," he said, not quite hiding how taken aback he was.

"Isn't it always?" she replied, as casually as ever. She was partly right, anyway. Stevie never expected to see her, but there were patterns to her visits: she'd always wait for a moment when Stevie was completely alone and they'd customarily end up at the reborns café where she'd taken him the first time. According to her own words, it was the only place where they were guaranteed to be completely safe to talk about their _business_.

Stevie shot JT a glance and their eyes met for just a second. JT smiled at him, Stevie smiled back, and then he turned to Bethany, who was watching him with a wistful air about her.

"I kind of am waiting for someone," Stevie explained. "Can't leave now."

"I know. It's the gentleman behind the counter, isn't it?" she asked, not at all discreet in her observation of JT, who pretended not be curious over Stevie's new company as he continued to chat away merrily with the costumers from behind the counter.

"Yeah," Stevie admitted. "John."

Bethany smiled. "You've always had good taste."

"Thank you," Stevie said, lips tugging upwards just a little bit. Bethany seemed to keep a pretty close eye in everything he did, always seemed to know who he was seeing at the time, sometimes even better than himself. She liked to investigate how his life was going before showing up, she said. _'To make sure I'm not intruding too much.'_ Stevie told her several times that all she had to do was ask, he was far more comfortable telling her everything himself than having someone snooping around. _'You never realize I'm snooping around though, do you?'_ was all she answered, as though that was sufficient explanation.

"He seems like a good boy," she continued. "How long do you think you'll be with him?"

"I... Don't know? I'm not thinking of ending things with him in the immediate future, if that's what you want to know."

"I was just wondering if you think he's good enough for a lifetime."

"I..." Stevie stopped mid-sentence, straightening his eyes at Bethany in a questioning way. "What is this about? You never ask me that kind of thing."

Bethany smiled that wan smile of hers again, her fingers drumming idly on the tabletop, eyes lowering away from Stevie's face. He felt a cold shudder at the pit of his stomach all of a sudden, and it took him a second to realize why.

Over the years, Stevie grew accustomed to Bethany's presence. His initial hesitancy and the small trauma created by their first encounter faded away as they grew closer. She acted as a bit of a mentor to him, teaching him things he would've never figured out by himself, showing him to a world of possibilities he wouldn't even have thought of exploring. Stevie considered Bethany a friend now, a good friend. Maybe even his best friend. Certainly the only one who really _knew_ him. She was as kept together and poised as you'd expect a reborn of her experience to be - no one noticed Bethany unless she wanted to be noticed. But Stevie learned how to read her manners and see past her masks over the years. And he certainly knew what that look meant. How could he forget? It was the exact look he got when she told him about the anchor.

"Beth..." Stevie started, nervousness already creeping up on him. "What is it?"

"How are you feeling, Stevie?" 

"How am I...? I'm fine. Why?"

"Aren't you feeling a little... tired?"

"No. No particularly."

"Are you sure?"

Stevie stopped to consider the question more deeply. "Well, I... A little. I'm taking things slowly this time around. I kind of went a little crazy in my last life."

Bethany chuckled. "I heard. Don't worry - I'm not judging. We should all go crazy at least once. Maybe twice, just to cover more ground in the craziness spectrum. We do have time for that, anyway."

He waited for her to say something more, and when she didn't, he asked again, "Why are you asking if you already know?"

"Because, Stevie... Don't you think it's a little odd that you've carried _exhaustion_ on to a new life?"

"I... Had never thought about that. Is it?"

Bethany swallowed down hard, forced herself not to look away again. "You're dying, Steven."

And that... Well, _that_ really was unexpected. Stevie's eyebrows shot up to his hairline in confusion. Trust Bethany to never dance around the point with controversial matters.

"I'm... what?"

"Dying. Your cycles are ending. You don't have much longer."

There was a space of silence for about five seconds before Stevie burst into laughter, so loud even John turned to look from the counter. He only managed to reign himself in when he realized Bethany wasn't laughing as well. If anything, she looked more serious than before. Sadder.

"It does sound ridiculous," she said. "When you hear that for the first time, anyway."

Stevie swallowed down the last bit of laughter feeling his heart grow heavy all of a sudden. "What the hell are you talking about, Beth? I _can't_ die. Believe me, I've tried."

"It happens. Eventually. We don't know how or when. That's just another thing that doesn't seem to make much sense about us. We don't know what creates us; we don't know what decides when it's time to take us away. But the same force that wants to ground us through anchors eventually finds a way of eliminating us." She made a pause then, drawing the air in sharply, and when she spoke again her voice came out more than a little shaky around the edges. "And your time is almost over, Steven. I'm so sorry."

_Your time is almost over._

_You're dying._

There was a time when Stevie would've given anything to hear those words. But in his 23rd life, he wasn't sure what to make of it. Death had never seemed like a scary prospect to him; an inconvenience at most. It's really boring to be a three years old with the mind of hundreds of years. The last time he'd ever faced death as a normal person had been so long ago Stevie couldn't even remember what it felt like. 

Dying. He was dying.

"How... How is that possible?"

"Oh, God," Bethany said, shaking her head. "I was hoping I'd only ever have to explain that part to you when my time came. You're so young still... You know how we can feel each other's presences, right? Well, some of us can feel it stronger. Usually the older ones. The longer you live, the more sensitive you become to the shifts in time. And that's what we cause, a shift in time. These people, they know when someone new is born, and they know when someone is taken away from the timeline, either by assassination or because their time has simply faded. And when that is the case, they can usually tell beforehand. Sometimes lifetimes ahead."

"So... When I die, that will be it? I'm not coming back anymore?"

"Two more lifetime, Stevens. You'll die on your 25th. You have this life and the next two to plan. And then it will be over."

Two lifetimes. That suddenly felt like such little time. Was that how being a normal person felt like? 

"How long have you known this?"

"Not long. I went to lots of people to confirm the information. Sometimes they sense different things. We make mistakes too. Unfortunately, it seems like they're right about you."

"Did I do something wrong?" Stevie asked, thinking back on all the bad decisions he'd made before. He killed only once, while acting as a wild life preservationist in Africa, but that was arguably for a good reason. Surely there are mutants out there killing many more. He'd never committed any crimes, as far as he could remember. Well, he did some shoplifting in his early years as a teenager, but don't they all? Some speed limits were broken. Some people had their noses fractured by his fist, but never without a good cause (he thinks so, anyway). "Am I being punished?"

"No, it doesn't work like that. Some people are terrible and live for twenty thousand years, some people are perfectly well behaved and get taken away before their tenth cycle. We can't tell for sure what it is. Maybe there's a cosmic disease killing us. We don't know."

Stevie fell silent again, immerse in thoughts. There was too much to register. It was hard to digest that kind of information. 

_You're dying._

"Why are you telling me? Why not just let me go?"

"Because, Steven..." Bethany speaks around a sigh. "I think you might have a thing or two you want to do with the time you have left. We don't tell everyone. Some people just go crazy when they realize they're going to die, start ruining the timeline trying to fix it. But I don't think you're like that. You deserve to know. Take whatever time you have left, Steven, and spend it at your heart's will. If you want to be with the fine gentleman over there, that's good. He seems good. But if there's anywhere else you'd like to go... Don't hesitate."

x-x-x

_Don't hesitate._

That's easier said than done.

Tell anyone they have a few more years to live and then ask them what they'll do with their time. The first thing is: they'll hesitate. It's too heavy a question, too much for a person to bear, the weight of being precise with their decisions for whatever time they have left so that they can die without regrets is simply too heavy. And for someone like Stevie there was the added bonus of having to learn how to handle that sort of pressure, how to come to terms with mortality. It's not an idea that came naturally to him.

Yes, he still had a lot more time than the average person in roughly the same circumstance ever would, but time was a very relative thing from his point of view. Two and half lifetimes was nothing. It would go by fast. 

Stevie did get to spend more time with JT, but it wasn't the same. After Bethany's visit Stevie found it hard to focus again for a long time. His head was always miles away. JT asked him a billion times who that woman was - even he could trace Stevie's strange behavior back to her - but Stevie never shared more than the fact that she was an old friend. Eventually he realized he'd become more of a burden to JT than anything, always thoughtful and sulking and considering possibilities that were very far away from his tiny London flat and Sunday football. They parted ways about six months later.

Then Stevie started going around the world again, seeing reborns to talk about _death_. Some of them refused to get into the matter, some of them had lost many beloved friends, some of them were also on their countdown. Some of them had been alive for over five thousand years and yet not a sign that their cycles would be over any time soon. There was no way to tell, no way to avoid it. 

Once he accepted the idea that his fate was sealed and there was absolutely nothing he could do to change it, Stevie decided he had to figure out a way to deal with the anxiety. So he continued to travel, seeing people from all sorts of backgrounds and beliefs, anyone who could help him find some peace of mind.

He ended up spending most of his time in Bali with an old philosopher who was a meditation master. He taught Stevie how to get in touch with his soul, so to speak, how to shut out the entire world in order to communicate with himself and the powers that be. Meditation worked wonders for him. So much so that Stevie never went back home. He died at the age of 86, more peacefully than ever before. But before that, he made a list.

His 24th life was for seeing the things he wanted to see again before dying. People normally take a few months or years at most to do that. Stevie had the advantage of being able to do his visits calmly. He spent time with Carra in his early years, then he went to see David, Luis, Martin and Daniel. He stopped by JT's bar a couple of times. Fernando was a little harder to find. He was as furious and rebellious as ever, never stopping for too long in one place. 

If it wasn't for how frustrated he'd been about Xabi back when they met, Stevie thinks they might've been really happy together. Which they kind of managed after a lot of failed attempts, but not for long enough, and not completely. They were both hurt, neither of them whole - Stevie because he didn't have Xabi, and Fernando because he knew he'd never have Stevie. He wished he'd realized that before. Still, they spent wonderful years together and Fernando gave some colors to a life that would've lived forever in Stevie's mind as a terrible and disappointing one otherwise. 

When Stevie finally found him, he felt like he owned something to Fernando. A debt to be paid, like a thank you or an apology. Stevie took him to the other side of the world and watched as Fernando's normally angry dark eyes sparkled in wonder. How absolutely beautiful he looked when he was excited, genuinely happy - when his demons couldn't get to him. Fernando was a good lad who had a bit of an unlucky life. If Stevie could offer him even five minutes of peace, than he'd consider himself honored. He made love to Fernando like he was the only one in the world, worshipped every patch of skin on his body. For the whole time they spent together, Stevie loved him, and only him. It wasn't a long time, it could never be - Fernando never stops, never settles - but it was the happiest Stevie remembers seeing him. Good enough for a goodbye gift.

Then it was Finns.

Stevie saved him for last because it was bound to be more complicated than with everyone else. For starters, he'd have to calculate his timing very well to make sure he wouldn't be accidentally bumping into Xabi at the café. He just wasn't ready for that yet. Plus, he wasn't even sure whether Finns would still be at the Buddha. And, well, there was also the fact that Finns was... Different. More special, in certain ways. With him, it wasn't just about stopping by, saying hello and moving on. He'd spent 50 years with Finns once, which is still the most Stevie's ever been with anyone. There's no way he'd ever be like the others. Finns was simply more.

Stevie realizes now that there was a lot of transferring on to Finns his frustrations regarding Xabi. All the life he wanted to have with Xabi and never could for obvious reasons, he had with Finns, and only Finns. Stevie never felt like doing it with anyone else. There was just something about Finns... It was so unpretentious, the way he came into Stevie's life that it took him by surprise. He never saw what hit him. Before Stevie could even understand what was happening, he was already, apparently, in love with someone who wasn't Xabi, even though Xabi was _right there_ , and that was... Well, surely something.

Finns showed Stevie that there was more to life than the three stages he seemed to get constantly stuck on, every single time: the waiting, the fear of loss and the never-ending grief. As far as Stevie's horizon went, that was it, and he'd gladly be stuck in that loop forever if that meant spending a few golden years with the man he loved. But then along came this Irishman, pushing through his defense walls with coffee and smiles, tearing down his barriers and annihilating hundreds of years of planning so effortlessly it was like he wasn't even trying. Finns wasn't Xabi's rebound, he wasn't someone who mended a broken heart, and he wasn't there just to keep Stevie's bed warm in times of loneliness. He was just... different.

A special snow flake.

Finns was still working at the Buddha, but he wasn't the same 20-something idealist Stevie first met all those years ago. Now he looked like the mature mid-thirties Finns who'd said yes when Stevie asked him to move in together. Stevie meant to step forward and just start talking - it wasn't hard at all; all you had to do to catch Finns' attention was say 'hello, how's it going?' because he was humanly incapable of ignoring words directed at him - but he couldn't. Stevie felt a little tingly feeling at the pit of his stomach and got _stuck_. He hadn't seen Finns in ages and suddenly there he was, moving from one side to the other, taking orders and making coffee and smiling and winking and making small talk and for a moment there it was too much. All Stevie could do was sit in the back and watch from a distance, taking it all in.

It was hard to tell what the weirdest part was: being there for Finns again, so many years later, or knowing that it would be the last time. The man whose clock never stopped ticking is running out of time, finally. Every single goodbye he's given has felt a bit like a stab. 

So much changed between the first time they met and the last. Well, for Stevie, anyway. For Finns as well, but merely because Stevie wasn't there, so what he did was follow the normal course of his life. He looked exactly the same, acted exactly the same. But Stevie was not the same person anymore. The past 17 lives shook him up and spat out someone different. It was as though he could see clearer now, like he'd been watching the world through blurry and more innocent lenses back when he and Finns first got together. 

And of course this wasn't the first time Stevie said goodbye to Finns. The first was much more painful. As soon as he stepped into the Buddha, the scene started playing back in his head like a movie. Finns' hair as white as salt, his skin saggy and wrinkled, his movements a lot slower and his touches a lot more unsure as he tried to learn how to live with a body that didn't obey him quite well and in the same speed anymore. Stevie could see his parted lips as he panted and the fear in his eyes as he realized he wouldn't make it past that morning.

"Hey." Stevie snapped out of his thoughts at the sound of a familiar voice.

It was Finns, rubbing his hands on his apron and smiling amicably. Stevie blinked, then looked outside the window. It was dark already. He must've been there for hours.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, you seemed like you were very concentrated," he said. "But we're about to close and I noticed you haven't ordered anything - yes, I was watching you from behind the counter, I'm sorry. I do that," he explained, raising his palms out in the air as an apology.

Stevie chuckled. "That's all right. You can watch all you want."

Finns faltered for a second, caught off-guard by Stevie's unexpected flirting. He tucked his hands into his apron's front pockets - which Stevie remembered as being something he did whenever he felt embarrassed. That only made the smile on Stevie's face grow larger - as well as the disconcerted look on Finns' face.

"Ok," he said, "Thank you. I guess. Uhm... So, I just wanted to ask if you'd like anything. 'Cause you haven't ordered yet. And, like I said, we'll be closing in another thirty minutes. No pressure, though. You can just sit there and watch if you like - I mean, you don't have to order anything. That's what I was trying to say. We don't have that policy here."

And that was it. Stevie was charmed by Steve Finnan's magic all over again.

"I'd like something, actually," he said, getting up. "I'd like a double chocolate chip crème Frappuccino."

"That's a brilliant choice," Finns said, beaming. "It's my favorite." Who would've guessed, huh? "It'll be right out."

But before he could go, Stevie added, "And to sit by the counter and have a little chat, if you don't mind. I haven't done that in a while." Finns eyed him as though he were trying to figure out whether he should've remembered Stevie's face - he did everyone else's. "I mean chat. I've been sitting here by myself all day. I could use some interaction."

"Oh. Right," Finns said, sort of relieved he hadn't forgotten someone for what would probably be the first time. "I'm great at chatting. Come and sit with me."

And so he did, and they sat there and talked for hours and hours, long after the café was closed. It was as easy as it had always been, as though Stevie hadn't stopped showing up for centuries. Bethany says normal people never remember, not even as an afterthought. "They're not like us. We're re-born in alternate realities, Steven. What we lived doesn't exist anymore - not to us and definitely not to them," she explained. Stevie thinks there might be something there - some sort of impression or a magnetic attraction so subtle that can go by completely unnoticed. It's just easier to get along with certain people. It's the same principle as the anchors. 

If he had more time, Stevie would go deeper into his theory.

Since he doesn't, he resigned himself to going back to the café the next day, and the next, and the next, and the next. And he kept going back for weeks until he finally decided to pull Finns aside and kiss him as they walked to the tube station.

Stevie wasn't planning on staying for more than a few months. Maybe a year. No longer than that. But, just as before, he ended up having a change of heart. Stevie stayed with Finns for the next 30 years, and he doesn't regret it at all.

The disease that always takes him at the age of 78 caught up sooner this time, for whatever reason. Perhaps because his soul was growing more tired, weaker, and that was probably affecting his body as well. Bethany said he'd feel the effects as his time ebbing away, so he wasn't that surprised when his death came at the age of 62. It was Finns holding his hand this time, kissing his forehead as he got worse and worse. Stevie didn't fight too much. There was no reason to. He'd already fulfilled that lifetime's purpose.

Everyone he wanted to see for one last time, the places he wanted to revisit, all checked out. Just one more life ahead, one more rebirth, before it was all over.

And for his last life, there was only one place Stevie would ever want to go. One person he'd ever want to see.

He patiently waited for the 21st of April of 2015. If felt like a billion years. But it's finally here. His last 21st of April of 2015. Damn...

Xabi is as late as ever. As annoyed as ever. As wet and as beautifully disheveled as ever.

It's almost too much for Stevie to bear. Fifteen lives spent away from this man and still his pulse races, his heart beats faster, his breath falters and every single piece of his body shakes in anticipation, desperate to get closer, to _feel_ him again.

Fuck this anchor bullshit. This is _love_. Overwhelming, all-consuming, larger-than-life love. The greatest love of all. The love of his life. Of all his lives.

This is his last life, and Stevie just wants to say proper goodbye to the one person who gave meaning to all the twenty four that came before.

 

x-x-x

 

Liverpool looks absolutely beautiful in the dusk.

It's not always that one gets to watch the sunset in Liverpool, mind you. Days are usually divided between bright grey sky and dark grey sky. But whenever the sun does come out, the city looks absolutely magnificent with the dying rays of light shining weakly over its red bricks and muddy waters. 

Stevie hasn't been to Liverpool in ages. Last time was when he played Captain Fantastic and won the Champions League for LFC. That was also the only time he ever lived in Liverpool, which is ironic considering he never feels as at home in any other city as he feels in here. Somehow he just knows this is his place. Maybe there is such a thing as an anchor city as well. Maybe the city plays a huge part in why he gets dragged back on that 2.50pm train time and time again. Liverpool is his place in the world.

There's a difference this time, though. A huge sense of melancholy. Stevie doesn't know for sure yet, but this might just be the last time he watches the sunset over the river Mersey. Hell, it might as well be the last time he sets foot in Liverpool. Goodbyes are always gloomy, aren't they? He's left a little bit of his soul behind each time he said farewell in the last couple of lives, be it to a place or a person. His heart always feels a little heavier once he leaves for good. 

"I had a feeling I'd find you here."

Stevie doesn't have to turn to know Bethany is there. He's become better at this sensing other reborns thing over the years; he knew she was approaching long before she announced herself. And anyway, even if he couldn't feel her presence, he could've put all his money on her being here right now. In fact, he was expecting to see her a lot sooner. On the train.

"I had a feeling you'd know that," he replies, grin tugging at the corner of his lips, but he still doesn't turn away from the river. He doesn't want to miss the last bits of light. "You weren't on the train, though."

"Oh, no. Never. That would've ruined everything, wouldn't it?" she says, taking the spot right next to him, bumping his shoulder lightly with her own. "I figured you could use a little privacy. My presence would've made you shy."

That is true. If Bethany had been there, he would've probably gone ahead with his original idea of not talking to Xabi, just sitting there and watching him during the whole ride. In the end, it was simply stronger than him. That was very thoughtful of her. "Thank you," he says.

"Did you talk to him?"

"Yes."

"Did he take your number?"

"Yes."

"Has he called you?"

"No yet." Stevie opens his palms, where his phone is, fingers wrapped tightly around it as though it were a precious jewel. It's almost time for that phone call he knows he's about to receive. Almost time to make a decision.

"Are you going to answer it when he does?"

Stevie sighs. "Are you here to make sure I don't?"

"Of course not, Steven. I'm here to see you. And because I thought you might need some support. This is your last life," she says, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder and rubbing is lightly. "I'd never dare to tell you what to do with it."

"Weren't there rules about the anchors or something?"

"Rules be damned."

Stevie finally turns to face her, frowning, a funny smile on his face. "Beth..." he says. "Look at you, all rebellious and irresponsible. What would the coven leader say if he could hear you right now?"

Bethany snorts. "Well, first of all, it's not a coven. And second, I couldn't care less. It's _your_ life. Not theirs. Unless you're trying to destroy the world and kill dozens of our kind in the process, The Club doesn't get to have a say on what you'll do with whatever time you have left." She pauses, grinning lightly. "You're not planning on messing with the timeline, are you?"

"Not at all."

"Well, then. There you go."

They lapse back into silence for a moment as the night finally falls, sky turning dark blue above their heads. 

"I don't know if I'll answer the phone when he calls," Stevie says. "I didn't even mean to talk to him on the train. It just sort of... happened."

"Don't you want to spend your last moments with him?"

Does he want to spend the last years of his last life with Xabi? Is the sky blue?

Fifteen lives apart from Xabi have turned the pain of missing him into something so great Stevie can barely hold it together. And the sensation only seems to intensify when he knows they are geographically close. Just because he accepted and has become quite good at concealing it, it doesn't mean it's not ripping him apart on the inside.

"More than anything. It's been a constant battle, stirring from Xabi all those years. I can't think of any other person I'd like to spend my last years with other than him. That's all I've thought about for the past 25 years. This 21st of April."

"So what's the problem?" 

"Does the fact I'm dying mean I'm no longer a reborn? Does that break the anchor curse on him?"

Bethany purses her lips, her hand sliding down to the small of Stevie's back as she finally understands where he's going. "No, darling. It does not."

"Well, then," Stevie says, a little angrier than he meant. It's not her fault. Bethany is the carrier of the bad news and the keeper of the status quo, but she's only the messenger. She doesn't make the rules. "It won't really be spending time with him, will it? It'll be dodging death and watching him withering away to fucking cancer right before my eyes. Xabi still dies if I stay with him. And I'm not sure _that_ is what I want for my last life. To lose him again. I've lost him enough."

Bethany watches him studiously for a second. "I suppose this is something I'll have to ask myself as well."

Stevie turns to her, eyebrows knit together in interrogation. 

"Two more," she answers, smiling softly. "Then it's over for me as well. And don't give me that look, Steven. I'm not sad, really. I've lived long enough. Much longer than you. I'd give my last years to you if I could. I've literally ran out of things to do. This will be just... Killing time. And I won't even have my little apprentice anymore."

Stevie wraps an arm around her slim waist and pulls her into a half embrace. It's strange how small Beth feels like that. He doesn't fail to notice that this is the first time they actually hug. Bethany's always been this enormous presence, so much older, so much wiser. Like this, she's just a woman, a normal, human woman, her head barely reaching his chin. 

She lays her head on his shoulder, takes a deep breath. "I haven't seen him in almost a millennium," she confesses, so low he can barely hear her voice. "This is where I always meet him. Liverpool. When we do get together, he dies around the same time you meet your Spaniard on that train. It's why I keep making that trip every once a while, even though I know he won't be here. He moves to New York and marries an American when we don't meet. That's where his life takes him. I still come, though. Just to remind myself why we cannot be together. It does get unbearable at times."

Stevie pulls her closer still, places a kiss on the top of her head. He never heard the details of Bethany's anchor. She doesn't talk a lot about her personal life. Few bits here and there, mostly anecdotes or interesting facts, never things that really touched her. Beth, of course, knows absolutely everything about Stevie, which has always seemed a little unfair to him. 

He's glad she decided to tell him now. Let him know he's not the only one going crazy by the year as he runs as far away as possible, putting miles and miles between himself and the object of his affection. Stevie's always put Bethany on a pedestal; it's good to know she's human too. They all are, deep down.

"But you shouldn't let the fear of making a mistake scare you away from what your heart wants, Steven," she continues after a brief pause. "That's what humans are best at, making mistakes. This is the closest to a human life you'll ever get. Make mistakes if you want to."

"Yeah..." he speaks around a sigh. Five more minutes before the phone sparkles into life with Xabi's number flashing on the screen. Five minutes to make a decision that will alter the rest of his remaining days.

Is there any fate more bitter than to get to what you long for most when it's already too late?

"Beth?" he says, breaking their companionable silence.

"Hmm?" she responds.

"Can you do me a favor?"

"Anything, darling."

"In your next life," he says. "Can you do me a favor in your next life?"

Beth lifts her head to look him in the eye, suspicious of his request.

He might not be here the next time their world restarts, but he can still leave something behind that will last slightly longer than his body and soul.

 

x-x-x

**Five years later...**

Stevie tightens his white-knuckled grip on the edge of the roof, bends forward just a tiny bit more to peek down. Two hundred and sixty two feet of free fall into the darkness.

He's been thinking a lot about the afterlife lately. Or whatever name you might give to what comes once you're dead. It's not something Stevie had ever given much consideration before, mainly because there was no point. It's too huge a question to ponder, too many variables and hazy unfounded theories, gives you a headache once you start thinking about it. Why bother if you won't stay dead, right?

To Stevie, afterlife was a bit of a blank space, a lot like falling asleep after an excruciatingly long and exhausting day, then spending a couple of years very drunk, then hungover before everything finally started to make sense again, sometime after his third or fourth year in the next life. 

The first time he died, back when he still thought it would stick, he was so sick in his late 70s he barely had a moment to consider _'Hmm, what now?'_. Mostly, he just prayed that it would all be over soon, that some higher power would take pity on his suffering and come down to relieve him of his earthly pain. That was all there was in his mind back then, as far as he can remember: the pain.

Well, after everything he's been through in his over two thousand years of existence, here he is, face to face once more with the sticky death situation. It's not the pain that worries him. It's what happens next.

What now? He's been asking himself that question every single day. It's the first thing on his mind when he wakes up, the last before he gets swept away by sleep. 

_What now?_

Is there anything at all? Is he still a conscience? Is he still able to see? To feel? Or is it just like being stuck in the blank space part forever?

It's hard to believe in heaven and hell when you're like him, which just makes everything more complicated. Stevie has come to the conclusion that a lot people make the deliberate choice of believing there is something good or evil waiting for them after death, depending on how they conduct themselves throughout their lives, because it's simply easier that way. It's quite objective: be nice, try not to kill anyone, make good if you can, and you'll go to heaven; fuck up and become a waste of everyone's time and you'll take the elevator down. Not very difficult. If you start considering physics and the probabilities involved in the actual existence of a God up there and a devil downstairs and how much they would in fact influence our lives... Well, that's when it tends to spin out of control. 

Stevie doesn't really believe in God either. He's pretty sure there must be a higher power somewhere, like a cosmic force of some sort ruling over the universe and keeping the balance. Like, say, a prime minister of the galaxies. He doesn't think of that power as a God in the usual manner, though. It's hard to do so when you're a reborn. For some reason, he doesn't think infinite resurrecting powers seem like a very godly thing. At least not a godly thing that would be bestowed upon ordinary humans. No, that power is there to keep harmony and make sure life progresses as smoothly as possible - and also to eventually fix mistakes, like creating being who can skip across alternate timelines by being brought back to life over and over again.

That's what Bethany believes, anyway. It seems reasonable enough. She has no idea about the actual afterlife, though. No one's ever come back to share the experience.

Well, he guesses he'll find out soon enough, anyway. He would come back if he could, just to let her know what to expect.

But maybe the mystery is a key part of the whole plan. Maybe no one is ever supposed to find out what comes after death while they're still alive. Maybe that knowledge would ruin the whole purpose of _living_. It's _not knowing_ that keeps everyone on their toes. Just imagine if someone came back from the other side to say 'Hey, guys! Chill! It's all good here! We're baking cupcakes, petting some puppies and the piña colada is delicious!' Death would certainly not seem so scary, would it? Perspectives would be all different. Stevie's pretty sure many people would prefer death over life. And wouldn't that just beat the point?

His case is nothing like that, of course. It's not about preferring to die. It's just he's lived long enough, and throughout his entire existence he's been a pawn in the hands of fate. A couple of accidents killed him along the way, but Stevie only ever took his own life on purpose once, and for reasons he considers to be more than sufficiently justifiable. Overall, he died more natural deaths than the unnatural kind. Now the wind is blowing the other way around for the first time. Stevie has taken the wheels of his own life, and the power to decide when and how he dies is entirely in his own hands.

And that's exactly what he just did: decided.

Joke's on you now, Prime Minister. See who's laughing last. Ha-ha.

There won't be much left of Steven Gerrard when he hits the pavement, two hundred and sixty two feet beneath him. No more than a pool of blood and meat and broken bones. It's not exactly a dark though, more like a gory one. There were other options, of course. Faster ones. Cleaner ones. But there is no poetry in a shot to the head or lethal doses of Tylenol. The seconds that it will take for him to hit the ground will be the longest in his life - and that is saying a lot. He'd like to take that moment to... Do something. Revisit his Top 5 Best Moments? Remember Xabi? Free himself of all the weight of 2000 years of living by staring death in the eye and knowing that, this time, it will last? So many options, so little time.

He's wondering if he'll feel any pain, whether he'll be able to hear the sound of his bones cracking in the split-second between the first milimetric portion of his body touches the walkway and the moment he actually dies. Now, _that_ is gory.

He feels his cell phone vibrating against his thigh. It's half past nine already. He was supposed to be home an hour ago. _Damn_.

Xabi's ginger beard greets him from the screen. Even before he takes the call, Stevie's mouth draws into a smile. "Hello, love of my life," he says.

"Flattery isn't getting you anywhere, Gerrard. You're _late_ ," Xabi replies from the other end, his voice as calm and cool as ever. "Mind telling me where the hell are you?"

"Oh, Xabi? I'm sorry. I thought it was someone else."

"Funny," he says. "Are you going to answer my question?"

Stevie chuckles, takes a deep breath. The air is so much better from up here. Even the chilly breeze doesn't bother him. He's been coming here a lot lately, ever since he figured this would be a good point to commit suicide. It's also a good place to think. And, well, taking your own life is not exactly a straightforward decision. There's a lot of planning involved. 

"I am... Very high," Stevie says.

"What?" Xabi asks, obviously confused. "Since when do you take drugs?"

"I don't. Although that wouldn't be such a terrible idea. Maybe we should try something some time. Together. Could be fun."

"Steven," Xabi admonishes. Stevie secretly loves when he says his name like that, _Steven_. It's usually when he gets mad or annoyed, otherwise it's just Stevie. Stevie is guilty of provoking him on purpose at times just because he likes the sound of his own name on Xabi's beautiful Spanish vowels, yes.

"I'm at a high building, that's what I meant."

"What are you doing at a high building?"

"Just.. Had to pick up some stuff. For work."

"Well, thank you for letting me know. Not like I was waiting for you with dinner."

"I didn't know there was dinner. You said nothing about dinner."

"It was supposed to be a nice surprise. Now it's a cold surprise."

"I'm sorry," he says, and he genuinely means it. "I'll be home in fifteen. Can I make it up to you?"

"We'll see about that," Xabi says, and then, after a short pause, he adds, "If this is you trying to avoid the conversation about your birthday again, you should know that I'm not backing off so easily."

Stevie rolls his eyes. The birthday thing again. "I told you I really don't mind celebrating birthdays."

"It's you thirtieth birthday, Stevie. You only turn thirty once." Stevie nearly lets out a laugh at that. It's cute how concerned Xabi is with birthday arrangements because apparently he thinks thirty is a coming of age mark or something and it needs to be celebrated accordingly. Stevie wouldn't mind at all just spending the entire day in bed with his boyfriend. Being through you thirtieth birthday 23 times kind of makes it lose the sparkle. "We should get at least a restaurant reservation somewhere nice. And invite some people."

"I don't have people to invite."

"You have your two friends."

"I have _three_ friends," he retorts. He has four friends, actually, but Xabi doesn't know about Bethany. "But I just want to be me and you."

"If you're counting Finns and Harry as two of those three than you still have two friends."

"How does that make sense? Carra, Finns and Harry. That's three people."

"Yes, but Harry and Finns are a couple and they do everything together. That kind of makes them one."

"I think the government would disagree with you."

"What does the government have to do with this?"

"They gave each of them a different social security number, and they each have to pay their own taxes separately. I kind of think that makes them two people, not one."

Xabi goes quiet for a second. "You know, if I wasn't angry that my dinner is cold because you're late, I might've even laughed at that. Good answer."

Stevie's laughter sounds really loud, traveling in the air from the top of such a high building. It's like the entire city can hear him right now.

"I'll be right home," he says.

"You better. If I have to re-heat my dinner again, you're sleeping on the couch."

"We wouldn't want that, would we?"

"Actually - it might be nice to have the whole bed for myself for once. Maybe you _should_ be late."

"Five minutes."

"Love you."

He puts the phone back in his pocket, still smiling. Stevie's been through so many traumatic moments trying to survive alongside Xabi, and then trying to survive _away_ from Xabi, that he forgot how wonderful it was when they weren't under any immediate death threats. It's the most ironically upsetting thing in the world, how the quickest and deepest way to get hurt is just to love someone too much. Lose that and _bam_. Your entire life just starts falling apart around you, like a sand castle in a storm.

Not this time, though. This time everything will be different.

Up until the second his phone started ringing on the 21st of April of 2015, Stevie had no idea whether he'd take the call or not. In the end, his better judgment and self-preservation instincts got beaten by his usual lack of reason when it comes to Xabi Alonso. They did the same thing they always do: dinner, drinks, hotel... Five years and several death traps avoided later, here they are. Glued together by the hips as though that is the _only_ possible choice. As though it's _fate_. They were made for each other, Stevie's certain of that. Which just makes the whole situation even sadder. 

Xabi doesn't know he's going to off himself, of course. For a while, it was part of Stevie's plan to fill him into the whole story - the reborns, the anchors, the two thousand years of sulking around, all the works. But, honestly, what are the chances of Xabi ever believing him? It sounds absolutely insane. Telling Xabi about his drama would only change the way Xabi sees him, possibly cause him to worry for his boyfriend's sanity, and eventually tamper with whatever time they have left. No, thank you. Stevie's had enough of that shit. 

There's a neatly written letter safely hidden in one of Stevie's drawers at the apartment they've been sharing for the past three and a half years. One of the many wonderful things about Xabi is that he respects personal space, even inside his own house. He'd never go through Stevie's things unless he was requested to do so. Or unless Stevie were, say, dead. When the times come, he'll open that drawer and find out that his boyfriend was not a mad, afflicted man, but rather someone who was running on borrowed time. He'll hopefully understand that Stevie just _had_ to do it because there was no other way, and also that he had absolutely nothing to do with it. Quite the opposite. Xabi is the only reason he hasn't done it yet. He's the only thing that is keeping Stevie alive. He'll know he was loved more than everything, including time and life itself, and that Stevie wants him to carry on - to _live_ , preferably with no cancer, and be happy. Xabi works with Frank at the museum, so maybe there's still a chance for them once he's gone. He doesn't like to think of that possibility because it makes him jealous even though he'll be dead, and by his own choice, but it's good to know, at least in some level, that it exists. Xabi's still close to the healthy and un-deadly love of his life, so there's still hope for a happy ending for him.

For the sake of his own pride, Stevie will just consider that his and Xabi's stupid, senseless and absurd love is still greater than the other option. Frank Lampard and his stupid combination of dark hear and green eyes can go suck it.

Having the choice, he'd rather not make Xabi suffer, of course. But there is no outcome where neither of them gets to make it out of this unscathed. And after hundreds and hundreds of years of hurting, Stevie kind of thinks it might be his turn to be a little selfish here. This is his time to take the easy way out. Besides, it's not like Xabi will feel it the same way he did. He'll be heartbroken for a while, sure, maybe even traumatized (after all, his boyfriend will have _killed_ himself out of freaking _nowhere_ ), but he'll get up and move on. Xabi's strong. And he'll have support - _wonderful_ support. Stevie can't think of anyone he'd like to have next to him in a moment like that more than Finns. He's a brilliant friend, will hold Xabi's hand until the darkness is over and the sun is shining again. It's not by accident that Stevie brought them together in this life. 

And there's Bethany. She promised to keep an eye out for Xabi, in case something goes terribly wrong. Worst case scenario, she'll tell him the truth. Whether he'll believe her or not is a different story entirely. 

Beth also promised him something else, for when he's no longer a part of this world, not even as a tombstone. Right now, Stevie would trust her with everything that is holy and precious in this world, including Xabi. Not like he's got a lot of options, anyway.

Stevie breathes in, feels the icy air penetrating his lungs. He's never felt more alive than he does right now. This certainty he's got right here, the power in his hands to decide his own destiny for a chance, it feels liberating. It's only a tad ironic that London has never seemed more beautiful, never shined brighter, never smelled better than it does from up here. For the first time in a very, _very_ long time, this is just about him. His life, his choices, his needs. He's not compensating for anything, he's not running away from anyone, he's just... Living. It took him centuries to realize it, but this is what life really is all about: moving forward at your own pace, making decisions as the situations present themselves, not really knowing where any of them will take you. It's funny, but it's kind of nice to have this nervous feeling at the pit of his stomach, unsure of it will be like to step into the other side for the first time.

When Stevie came up here and looked down, 80 meters above street level, he was letting go of something huge and heavy and not his burden anymore. And it feels _great_. He feels sorry for Xabi, of course. But their final years together have been just wonderful. Stevie couldn't have asked for a better final life. 

Not resentments or grudges whatsoever. He doesn't even feel upset that he's dying anymore. Twenty five lifetimes is more than enough. He's come, he's seen, he's conquered. And now it's time to go. He's fine with that. A little anxious about the next bit - what happens to his millenary conscience once there isn't a body to shelter it anymore? - but all in all, he'd say he's better than ever.

Steven Gerrard is ready for the end. And the end is near.

It won't be tonight, though. Or the next. Not even next week, probably not next month either. Not yet. He's got a little bit more to give to this world and to the man who's waiting for him in the comfort of their home with fine wine and dinner.

Tonight, he lives. For real.

 

x-x-x

_**Epilogue** _

Xabi Alonso is weeks away from the most important opening night of his entire career. His name is on every single invitation sent to each of the over 300 high-profile guests. Even the Queen has been invited, although Xabi's been told (more than once, because he's made sure to ask _everyone_ ) that she isn't likely to come. But someone else from the palace still might, which doesn't help calming him down at all.

His is the mind behind every single detail in the preparation for the inauguration of the new gallery at the museum. He has single-handedly moved every piece of the puzzle, from planning, to fundraising, to development, to curation. He's personally spoken to donors, negotiated pieces, worked with the curators and even some of the artists. This exhibition is his baby. It's by far the most arduous, stressing and overwhelming job he's ever had, but it will all pay off - assuming everything works out fine, of course. Whether this exhibition flops or triumphs, it will be a watershed in his career, for better or for worse. Rumor has it, it might even put him as a frontrunner for the position of Managing Director in a couple of years.

_Youngest _managing director in the history of the Tate, mind you. But let's not get too overexcited.__

__He's been working nonstop for months. Sleep has become something that happens to other people. The anxiety has been building up, making him nervous and frantic and borderline crazy at times. It's a blessing that he's got such a loving partner offering him support and tea at home. Xabi doesn't know how he'd be able to handle everything and still function somewhat normally if it wasn't for his boyfriend; sometimes, he is legit the only thing keeping him from spinning out of control._ _

__He needs to remember to reward Frank for being so patient when this is all over. Maybe vacations somewhere sunny and warm._ _

__Opening night is his main focus of concern, of course, but today is making him particularly antsy as well. There's an important visit, one whose opinion will be a strong indication on whether he'll succeed or fail miserably._ _

__She arrived about an hour before and has since been joined by the museum CEO, who's personally showing her around the new gallery and introducing her to the concepts behind the entire exhibition. Xabi was adamantly against the idea of having her see the place four weeks before the opening night. There's so much yet to be done, they're not even close to being ready for critics to come and take a look around, especially one as important as Bethany Lloyd, the museum's greatest donor, responsible for over 80% of the funds that allowed Xabi to even have this exhibition. If it wasn't for her, there'd be nothing at all to see._ _

__Well, technically. Ms. Lloyd merely invests a fat amount of money that, according to her, was left by someone else. A Mr. Steven Gerrard. Everything she donates and every investment she makes is in his name. Which is why the new gallery is called the Steven Gerrard Gallery. She insisted on it when the CEO offered to name it after her. Xabi's done a lot of research on Steven Gerrard, this angel who has made his life so much easier throughout the years by always conveniently investing in his ideas for the museum, but there's absolutely nothing. It's like he never existed._ _

__Bethany said he died a long time ago, but left very specific orders as to how she should spend his fortune. Xabi thinks maybe Steven Gerrard isn't really the man's real name, because there's not even a record of a Steven Gerrard ever being born or dying anywhere in England. Strange, if you think how rich he was. Perhaps it's someone who'd rather remain anonymous. Which is totally fine by him, of course. He just wishes there was a way he could thank this man for all he's done for the museum and the art world in general (and himself in particular). Even if that meant sending flowers to a cemetery._ _

__The tour of the unfinished gallery takes about forty minutes, through which Xabi can barely contain his nerves. Good thing he's pro at keeping his poker face undisturbed. To all effects, he's cool as an ice cube outwardly; inside, he's burning like a volcano about to erupt._ _

__When Bethany Lloyd and the CEO start laughing at something, Xabi freezes from head to toe in alarm before relaxing. That's a good sign, right? It has to be. She looks entertained. Entertained is good. Right?_ _

__Xabi hasn't been with Ms. Lloyd many times, but he admires her so much. She has a statuesque kind of elegance to her, the type that leaves no doubt about how much of a beauty she used to be on her tender years. Xabi believes she must be on her 70s now, but her fragile heath makes her seem older still and every she comes around, it's like a decade has gone by. Lately, she has been in and out of hospitals a lot. They needed a wheelchair for her this time. She seems as delicate as a twig, the poor thing, like a wind gust could blow her away. Such a pity. All the conversations Xabi's had with her were so much fun. She's a pleasure to be around, can turn formal, business meetings into casual tea parties between old friends. Such an impressive figure._ _

__The CEO leaves the two of them together, alone, after a last round of thank-yous once their tour is over. Xabi watches in silence as she positions her chair outside the gallery and stares at the huge bronze plate they placed above the entrance. Steven Gerrard Gallery, it says. She smiles fondly at it, her eyes distant and unfocused as though her mind is traveling far, far away._ _

__He's afraid of interrupting her, and also a little mesmerized by how genuinely affectionate she looks in that moment. Whoever he was, Steven Gerrard certainly meant something to Bethany. Maybe an ex-husband or a past lover?_ _

__"You've done a marvelous work here, Mr. Alonso," she finally speaks after a moment, her eyes suddenly cutting back to him._ _

__"Ah... Well. Thank you," he says, smiling. An enormous weight is suddenly lifted from his shoulders and he almost lets out a breath he hadn't even noticed he was holding back all this time. _She liked it_. "Did you enjoy the tour?"_ _

__"I would've preferred if I'd been joined by you," she says, grinning. "But I understand there are certain hierarchical rules when it comes to pampering important people, so..." Bethany shrugs and leaves it at that._ _

__Xabi snorts and holds back the laughter. Can't really blame her, though; the CEO is a wonderful man, but he can be very excessive in his wordiness and proselytism when he thinks he needs to impress._ _

__"But anyway," Bethany continues. "I wanted to congratulate you for what you've done. Money very well invested, indeed."_ _

__"Thank you, Ms. Lloyd. It means a lot to me."_ _

__"I know. Which is why I wanted to tell you in person," she smiles again, that caretaker smile that makes Xabi feel like he could trust this woman with his life if he had to. "But call me Bethany, please. My name sounds beautiful on your accent."_ _

__Xabi chuckles, maybe even blushes a little - good thing he's got a very finely trimmed ginger beard, then -, and joins her in admiring the plate above the gallery._ _

__There's a long spell of quietness, during which Xabi is finally able to relax a little, knowing that his major donor, or the person representing his interests anyway, has approved what he did with their humongous contribution. A small step for men, a giant leap towards the Managing Director office._ _

__"Do you remember him?" Bethany says after a while, eyes still focused on the plate._ _

__"Remember who?"_ _

__"Steven."_ _

__Xabi frowns at her, wondering if maybe her disease has been affecting her more deeply than it seemed at first. Obviously she knows it's impossible for him to remember Steven, because they never met._ _

__"I'm afraid we never met," he says anyway, just in case she has, for some reason, forgotten._ _

__Bethany smiles then, an amused grin twisting the corner of her lips and showing a little teeth._ _

__"Yes, you did," she says. "A long time ago. On a train ride."_ _

__And that is... "What?" Xabi asks, eyebrows arched in surprise. Bethany laughs, apparently entertained by the look of utter shock on him. Train ride? A long time ago? How is that...?_ _

__Xabi doesn't know whether he's more embarrassed or confused. If he has indeed met Mr. Gerrard before, doesn't that make him an awful person for not remembering it? All this time he's been donating money to sponsor his causes within the museum and not once did Xabi ever even consider the possibility that Steven Gerrard was more than a complete stranger with a fervent passion for modern art. His mind starts instantly reeling back to all the millions of train rides he's taken before, but he cannot remember a single person he's ever become acquainted with or exchanged more than a few hurried words on a train._ _

__"Oh, God," he says, genuinely aghast to admit that he's got no idea. "I'm afraid I don't remember that. I'm so sorry."_ _

__"Oh, don't be," Bethany says, petting his hand with her own. "I didn't expect you to. It was a very long time ago, almost in a different lifetime. You wouldn't remember. I just asked because..." Her eyes move away from him, back to the plate, and then she shrugs. "Well. Just confirming a theory."_ _

__"I feel bad now," Xabi says. "I've always wanted to meet him and I can't remember him. But didn't you say he's....?"_ _

__"Dead? Yes. Unfortunately. He passed away a very long time ago. But he never forgot you," she says, eyes moving back to him with that same sort of warm intensity to them. "He left very specific orders as to what to do with his fortune. And his orders were to take care of you." She pauses, and then, "Of your work, of course. He knew how talented you were and that you were destined for great things. And he wanted me to help you whichever way I could. So all this," Bethany gesticulates towards the gallery. "All the money I've invested on his behalf throughout the years, it was all for you, Mr. Alonso. No one else. Just you."_ _

__And that is just... _Wow_. Xabi is suddenly bereft of words. Someone he has no recollection of having once met on a train ride has donated millions of pounds to sponsor his work because he saw something in him. How is that even possible? _How_ can he not remember that person? God, he is such a terrible, _terrible_ human being._ _

__Xabi feels a strange ache in his heart, like he's suddenly missing something, a point, or a memory, or something else entirely, something much bigger, and he can't tell what it is. It's like having a name on the tip of your tongue and still not being able to reach it._ _

__"I'm afraid I don't have much more time left," Bethany says, and for a second Xabi thinks she's telling him she has to go somewhere else, for some other appointment - but then he understands. That's not what she meant. Bethany Lloyd is dying. "But I want you to remember, Mr. Alonso. Even if you can't remember his face, at least remember his name. Know that there was once a man named Steven Gerrard whom you touched in ways you can't even imagine. I promised him you'd know that. And now you do."_ _

__"I... I don't know what to say."_ _

__"You don't have to say anything," Bethany replies, turning her wheelchair around and smiling at him one last time before leaving. "Just make him proud."_ _

__x-x-x_ _

__He starts spending a lot more time staring at that plate after the encounter with Bethany. Whenever he's got five minutes up his sleeve, that's what he does: he stares intently at the plate in the hope that it will spark a memory back into life and suddenly he'll remember Steven Gerrard. A train ride is so vague. Xabi's been up and down the country so many times it's hard to even remember all of the times he's been on a train, let alone strangers who might have traveled with him. But for whatever reason, he keeps going back to a train to Liverpool more than ten years ago. It's like his head pulls him back to that ride, he's got no clue why. All Xabi remembers is that it was pouring down outside and he almost missed the train, his cell phone died and he couldn't even tell anyone that he'd be late for the meeting. It was a hellish of a day, that one, which is the only reason he seems to remember it at all. He would know if there was someone worth remembering, right? If he'd met a man as passionate about art as he is. But there was no one there, he sat alone during that ride._ _

__He asked Bethany for a picture of Steven, but she only offered him the saddest smile he's ever seen and said there were none. There's so much mystery around this man, like he's a fairy tale. Bethany is apparently the only person who knows him, and not even she has any records of his existence. None that she wishes to share, anyway._ _

__But that is all beside the point now. Xabi has started to feel very protective of that plate. If that is really all that is left of Steven Gerrard, then he'll make sure it becomes a token of his existence. He had a second, smaller plate added to the side of the doors. There isn't much to say about him, but he thinks 'A man who dedicated his life to art and believing in dreams' describes him just fine. That's all anyone needs to know about him - he lived, he loved and he made Xabi's dreams possible. Now everyone can share a little bit of that by coming and visiting the gallery and reading his name on a wall._ _

__"You are brilliant!"_ _

__Xabi blinks out of his reverie, his eyes cutting back to the figure approaching him, smiling from ear to ear._ _

__Frank has just been to the gallery, one of the very few people Xabi allowed a sneak peek before the official opening, tomorrow. He figured his boyfriend deserved a preview, after everything he had to endure in the last few months._ _

__"Seriously, this is amazing," Frank says, stopping right in front of him and placing both his hands on Xabi's shoulders. "I haven't seen anything like this in all the time I've been here. You are going to be a hit by tomorrow night."_ _

__Xabi rolls his eyes at him. "Ok, you're very sweet, I get it. You don't have to exaggerate."_ _

__"I'm not exaggerating! I'm being serious. Xabi, this is huge. I'm so proud of you." Frank leans forward and smashes their lips together. Usually, there would be nothing much to it - it's just the two of them at the gallery, late at night, museum's closed... What's wrong with a kiss, right? But there's just something... He feels strange kissing Frank in that space, under that plate. There's a bit of a pang somewhere, and Xabi pushes him gently back._ _

__"Frank..." he says. "This is very inappropriate."_ _

__"No one can see us. We could bang here right now and no one would know. In fact -"_ _

__"Frank," he admonishes, nodding towards the cameras, even though those weren't the eyes he could feel boring holes onto his back. It's like the _plate_ can see them. Maybe Xabi is going crazy after all, so much stress and sleepless nights have finally taken a toll on him. " _Everyone_ would know. Just like they'll know we were snogging."_ _

__"Everyone knows about us. They wouldn't mind."_ _

__"I'm glad they know, not so glad that they can see us."_ _

__Frank gives him a dramatic eye roll and steps away, coming to stand side to side with Xabi, still in front of the plate, then he takes his boyfriend's hand and gives him a little squeeze. "All right, then. But your work here is over. You need to go home and rest for your big night tomorrow. And I _really_ need to snog my boyfriend a little bit, because it's been way too long and I miss him." Franks speaks it without an inch of resentment, but Xabi feels bad nonetheless. They've shared a bed only in theory for over a month, because they were barely ever there at the same time. Not once did Frank complain or accuse him of negligence. He deserves an award for Boyfriend Of The Year, for sure. "Can we go?"_ _

__"Yes," Xabi complies at last, squeezing his hand back. "Just give me a minute and I'll be right outside with you."_ _

__Frank shows him his watch, cocking a pointed eyebrow at his boyfriend. "Sixty seconds or I'll come back here to drag you out, Alonso."_ _

__Once he's left alone again, Xabi takes a deep breath, sweeps the room around with hawk eyes one last time. Everything's in order, everything is _perfect_. Tomorrow _will_ be a hit, Frank wasn't just sucking up to him. Everyone who's taken a look at the place has said so, even people who have been working at the museum for ages. They know a successful exhibition when they see one. Xabi won't be completely at ease at least until after tomorrow night is over and done with, but he is finally able to breathe and go home and have eight hours of sleep at last. Well, maybe a little less. Frank deserves some attention as well - and, frankly, so does he._ _

__He stops by the plate again, and is immediately filled with that sensation of not being alone in the room. Not in a bad way, though. It's not an uncomfortable or oppressive presence, it's just... Warm. Like getting a hug. He should hire some ghost hunters to check the area for spirits._ _

__"If you can hear me," he says, really low so no one else listens. It's just between him and the plate. "Whoever you are... Thank you. I hope I made you proud."_ _

__There's something like a breeze or a light wind, only it's not really that because there are no open windows, and it doesn't blow anything, not his jacket or the exhibition flyers stacked on a pile. Only he can feel it. As though his skin is being caressed by the lightest of touches._ _

__He really _does_ need to get some sleep. This is starting to mess with his head._ _

__Xabi takes one final look at the plate, wishes Bethany could be here to see it. She won't come tomorrow, has been admitted to the hospital again. Xabi plans on stopping by later to see her, maybe even before the event, if he can manage. He has made a video of the finished room to show her. Mostly, he just wants her to say whether she thinks Steven Gerrard would be happy with what he's done or not. It doesn't matter how much praise he receives, it just won't be the same without her (and consequently his) approval._ _

__He wants Bethany to know that he will keep his word to her. Getting noticed, moving up on the professional rank, receiving a recommendation for the position of managing director... That's all very neat. But Xabi has a different goal now. There's something else to all the effort he's made in the past four weeks, since Bethany's last visit. It's probably why everything has turned out so magnificently well. Why that exhibition is, more than anything, full of soul._ _

__Whoever Steven Gerrard was, he won't be forgotten. Xabi will make sure of that._ _

__

___Fin._ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Important to mention that I have no idea how museums work organization-wise. So everything written here is a wide guess. I have been to the Tate Modern a couple of times, but I honestly don’t even remember that well how the galleries were split – so! The only thing true is that I did research the positions and there is a Managing Director and a CEO indeed. Please forgive me if this all sounds like bullshit to you. I just decided to take some liberties (in the name of art! Cough cough).


End file.
